Advance Bank In Germany

25 Pages 6346 Words

consider how this is going to impact their business processes. The complexity of the situation is often overlooked. Saying this, not all IS strategies fail. Tesco, RBS, have all implemented a good system. So why do some IS strategies succeed and others do not?
Numerous IS strategies have failed due to companies investing vast amounts of money, time and effort in trying to move forward but have not taking into consideration the challenges that have confronted and are confronting businesses in respect to implementing an information strategy.

In this section of the report an attempt has been made to identify the challenges faced by Advance bank in the case study.

Enablers and Inhibitors

Luftman et al identify enablers and inhibitors as being challenges for strategy formation. The case study demonstrates quite a few examples of enablers where IT is supported by management and the IT department seems to have an understanding of the business as they have designed systems and aligned them with newly defined business processes which are working well for Advance. This was based on a pre-study but it has not been specified what this entailed. The IT projects were well prioritised with priority given to security and providing good customer service. However, with all this money being put into technology and call centres – claims 20-30% - Advance had budget constraints on marketing which has led to a small customer base.

System built from scratch

Advance did not rely on any ‘off the shelf’ solution. The challenge was to completely build a system from scratch. They were able to align the system with newly defined business processes and implement the system in a new organisation. They were not dependant on the systems used by their predecessor Vereinsbank. This has worked well for the organisation however Andersen Consulting were external consultants and had to design most of the hardware and software themselves. The case does...