Touro University International
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Principles of information Systems in Business and Organizations
Module 3: Case Study
“Was it good organizational politics for Overstock.com's CIO to act as he did? Do you have any better political advice to extend to him?”
Dr. Kathleen Hargiss
January 24, 2009
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ITM-301
Dr. Kathleen Hargiss
“Was it good organizational politics for Overstock.com's CIO to act as he did? Do you have any better political advice to extend to him?”
Overstock.com is one of the largest inter-net base companies in the world, and the success of their business is closely tied to the proper operations of their information system and how effectively it is able to process their customer’s orders. I applaud Shawn Schwegman, Chief Information Officer for Overstock.Com, for his courage to admit that his company had some obvious problem with their information systems network, and the processing of customer’s orders, but I think that he should have handle this situation a little better and more professionally. Was it good organizational politics for Overstock.com's CIO to act as he did? No! This action was not handled as an executive should handle this type of situation. First, you should make the CEO aware of the problems, and what the actions you have taken to correct it, no supervisor or manager would like to be blind-sided by an email or letter stating short falls of their company. Do you have any better political advice to extend to him? Yes, I would advise him, first to find out what is cause of the problem, and a solution, and how to avoid something like this in the future, and establish a plan of action and milestones to correct the problem, with build in milestone dates to check the status of the progress of the project. Although, it is easy to provide answers to a problem when you are on the outside looking in, but the one thing that any person who is in charge of a department or a project...