Itm302 Module 2

Running head: WAS IT GOOD

Was It Good Organizational Politics For Overstock.com's CIO to Act as He Did?

Joseph E. Thomas

TUI UNIVERSITY

WAS IT GOOD

Abstract

At the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2005; Overstock.com's CIO, Shawn Schwegman, sent a note to the company's key business partners apologizing for a number of problems that these partners have had to endure due to Overstock.com's poorly architected IT systems. (Imhoff, 2005) In his note, Schwegman wrote: "I'll start by saying that the vast majority of system problems we have are problems related to updates... At the end of the day, all of these problems boil down to Overstock's failure (read, my failure) to architect a system that can handle real-time updates promptly… I cannot apologize enough for both the number of problems you all have had to deal with and for the length of time you've been plagued with these problems. I consider this one of my greatest failures over the last two years and I am terribly sorry.” (Imhoff) "It's critically important that I prepare you for the worst," he wrote as he described a major Oracle upgrade and added that he "expects it to get worse in the short term," and better eventually. (Schuman, 2005).

WAS IT GOOD

Was it good organizational politics for Overstock.com's CIO to act as he did?

It was not good organizational politics for Schwegman to act as he did.

Russ Finney (n.d.) in his white paper titled “The Politics of Information and Projects” discusses how information is political and careers can be significantly impacted based on the perception of data results. Finney points out that failure to recognize these situations can be career limiting for the naive IS (IT) professional. Schwegman was a naive IT professional. "Prior to joining Overstock.com in 2000, Schwegman held various sales management and engineering positions at Sycamore Software Development Corp., Fechheimer Brothers Co., KiZAN, and PC Upgrades...