1)In chapter 1, the text provides examples of two brief case studies to illustrate the impacts of the concept of a foundation for execution. These are, the UPS example on pps. 14 16, and the Washington, D.C. Government example on pps. 16 19. Select two of the key disciplines (see pps. 8-10) required for companies to build effective foundations for execution, and discuss how and why they are different for the different environments represented by the two examples. Figures 1-3 and 1-4 may help you to identify the differences.

A) The UPS a well known company for its use of IT in business processes has been building and leveraging in its foundations for execution since late 1980s.UPS had dominated the U.S package delivery market for much of its eighty years, but the management recognized that the company would need a strong IT capability to compete in the future. UPS set out to build a foundation for execution embodying its industrial engineering tradition. In addition, management accepted that the nature of package delivery demanded highly integrated systems, so that no package should not be lost en route. UPS's new CIO and his staff developed an enterprise architecture to reflect the company's goals. A key characteristic of enterprise architecture was the specification for a single package data base. The enterprise architecture provides a long term view of a company's processes, systems and technologies so that individual projects can build capabilities not just fulfill immediate needs. Companies go through four stages of learning architecture approach to designing business process: business silos, standardized technology, optimized core, and business modularity.

The Washington, D.C. is a government agency will full fill the same needs of of public and private companies. It may differs with some performance objectives but the need to enable efficient, reliable, agile operations is the same. In the beginning the services to the public was poor later, mayor Williams has turned up better public services. The CTO adopted the following set of operations for interaction with constituents: A single point of entry, guaranteed closure, benign service delivery. The operating model has been provided for end-to-end integration of processes, as well as data sharing, between related agencies. There are nine service modernization programs, which represent functional clusters of districts multiagency systems. Each of districts 370 systems fits functionally into one of these nine programs: administrative, customer, educational, enforcement, financial, human, motorist, property, and transportation services. The service programs create standard, multiagency, end-to-end process for the district.

2) Describe what a "Foundation for Execution" is and discuss at least three reasons why it is important for a business.

A) Foundation of Execution means the automation of routine business tasks. Doing this allows people to concentrate on improving the business rather than just purely running it. So often the link between a good company and a bad one is this realization and aggressively pursuing it. Companies are not blessed with the equivalent of the human brain, which coordinates all human activities. Simple activities can also go wrong even after considerable pratice.so to focus on higher order processes such as serving customers, responding to new business oppurtunities,and develop new inventions managers need to limit they spend on routine activities. Automatic tasks has to be performed reliably and predictably without requiring any thoughts. For example a manufacturing company needs a transparent information on customers' orders, products shipped, finished goods inventory, raw materials inventory, work in process, invoices sent, Payment received and a host of related transaction data is just to perform at a minimum acceptable level. A mistake in any of these data can ripple effects on company's financial performance, its employee satisfaction, or its relationships with customers or suppliers. Here is where a foundation for execution enters the picture. It digitizes these routine processes to provide reliability and predictability in processes that must go right. The best companies go beyond routine processes and digitize capabilities that distinguish them from their competitors.

3)Referring to the article IT Transformation at Dell, Discuss why Dell decided to embark on a transformation, and the role(s) of the Enterprise Architects in the transformation.

A) As we all are very familiar with the Dell Company and how it has been expanded its all over the world. Initially it has been started with the software solutions so later on Dell has grown into not only a multi-national hardware and infrastructure provider but also an IT services and solutions provider as well. Rapid growth led to regionally specific expansion from country to country. Dell ended up with unique manufacturing facilities, regional order management systems, and different operating processes and systems throughout the world. So the companies has to plan a strategy to cover up the additional expansion it took a chance to embark on a transformation several years back so by the time of 2011 it product has been success in these sectors too.

Rhonda Gass, Dells vice president of IT strategy, Technology and Governance set up a direction for the IT giant with the help of enterprise architecture (EA) team. At an enterprise level of EA team includes ten major programs, each of which involves investments in the tens of millions of dollarsand, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. Some examples of these programs include: Global Quote to Cash, Global Service Delivery, Solution Selling, Global Manufacturing Execution, and Recurring and Usage based transactions.