Introduction
Phoenix is a financial service company that has its headquarters in Arizona but operates in the national market of the United States. The active online operations of this firm mean that it cannot afford regular failures within its IT system. It must have an effective system of measurement that will help it to measure its performance in the market (Anderson and Goodman 59). The system must be easy to use and it must take into consideration the uniqueness of this firm in the market. As a consultant, the researcher will develop a plan that can be used by the management to judge the operation of the teams within the IT department in a discrete way to ensure that the functions are conducted as per the expectations of the management.
System of Measurement at Phoenix’s IT Department
According to Daim and Albar, when developing a system of measurement, it is important to be very specific (43). Measurement systems or plans must focus on a given area within the department instead of looking at the broad operations of the firm. At Phoenix, the department of interest was the IT unit. It is important to note that this is a unique and very sensitive department that needs primary measurement plans.
The first plan can focus on the employee’s output within the department while the other will focus on the output of the structures such as the servers, networks, computers, and any other tool used in the department (Dwivedi 52). In this analysis, the plan will focus on a system of measurement for the employees within this department.
The assessment plan will try to determine how efficient the employees are in using the current system before the management can consider how to upgrade the infrastructure. It is only after using this plan that the Chief Operating Officer (COO) will be able to make informed proposals on what needs to be improved during the planned upgrade. The following model is a summary of the proposed system of measurement that will be used by the IT department to measure the performance of the employees and to identify issues that need to be addressed to improve this performance.
As shown in the figure above, there will be a systematic measurement of performance that will be done at this firm, and the chief operating officer will be able to monitor it easily at the firm’s headquarters. In the proposed system, there will be three subcategories of the performance assessment that will take place. To understand this system, it will be necessary to start at the lowest end. The firm currently has 17,846 investors being served in 13 branches and also at the firm’s headquarters. These investors are served by 113 staff at the 14 offices (13 branches and at the head office).
Each of the employees will be assigned specific clients to handle based on the geographic location of the client and the location of the offices from which they operate. Every employee has been assigned a dual PC system. In this system, the software will be installed that measures the time employees take in addressing official assignments, how the employees respond to customer needs, and any other issue relevant to their assignments (Misra and Rahman 72). The metrics of their performance may be time (in hours) spent in undertaking official duties per day. The software will also detect how often every employee uses the IT facilities assigned to them.
The information from each of the 113 employees will be collected at the office level and will be monitored by the branch manager who can act upon it if it is necessary. The information about the efficiency and performance of the team will then be reflected immediately at the headquarters in Arizona. The COO can then have a summary of the performance of each of the 113 employees and how optimally they are using the IT equipment.
If it is noted that they are using the equipment optimally but their service does not meet the demands of the investors, then this may be a sign that there is a need to upgrade the entire system and to introduce a system that has a larger capacity (Khosrowpour 27). If the review shows that the current IT equipments are underutilized, then it may be a sign that the firm does not need to upgrade its systems yet. What is necessary is to ensure that the individual employees within the department use the systems effectively (Proctor 31). The back-up system at the headquarters should also be put to test regularly to ensure that it is as efficient as the management expects.
Conclusion
The above model is specifically designed to measure the performance of the employees, specifically how optimally they are using the IT systems and structures to address various tasks within the firm. The system will make it possible to determine if it is the employees who are not making maximum use of the IT system or it is the system itself that is underperforming. This way, the chief operating officer will know the best action to take in addressing the weaknesses within the IT department.
Works Cited
Anderson, James, and Kenneth Goodman. Ethics and Information Technology: A Case-Based Approach to a Health Care System in Transition. New York: Springer, 2002. Print.
Daim, Tugrul, and Fatima Albar. Technology Assessment Forecasting Future Adoption of Emerging Technologies. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2011. Print.
Dwivedi, Ashish. Handbook of Research on Information Technology Management and Clinical Data Administration in Healthcare. Hershey: Medical Information Science Reference, 2009. Print.
Khosrowpour, Mehdi. Managing Information Technology Resources in Organizations in the Next Millennium. Hershey: Penn Idea Group Pub, 2009. Print.
Misra, Hosea, and Hakikur Rahman. Managing Enterprise Information Technology Acquisitions: Assessing Organizational Preparedness. Hershey: IGI Global, 2013. Print.
Proctor, Scott. Optimizing and Assessing Information Technology: Improving Business Project Execution. Hoboken: Wiley, 2011. Print.