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Original Date: 10/10/2005
Revision Date: / /
Best Practice : Information Technology Strategy
Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems has fully integrated information technology planning into the overall strategic planning model to provide solutions that focus on meeting immediate user needs while taking the longer view to develop systems that meet the emerging requirements.
IT organizations typically focus on providing management information solutions and key data for senior-level management and business reporting requirements. These solutions are frequently chosen and developed to suit the IT organization without factoring their impact on the success of the company. IT organizations often develop ineffective systems that are completely non-responsive to customer needs, reducing system efficiencies and usage. Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems’ (IDS’) IT organization established strategic plans to address these problems.
The IDS IT strategy uses Six Sigma lean initiatives structuring plans that are responsive to needs by aligning its organization to provide the partnering relationships considered key to the overall IDS structure. Partnering relationships are designed to enhance Six Sigma lean implementation and to facilitate Raytheon’s strategic objective of becoming a Joint Battlespace Integrator (JBI) by focusing on the company’s core operations process improvement goals of efficiency, effectiveness, capability and capacity (E2C2). IT is constructing an IT strategy linked to the business by developing system roadmaps to provide real-time data solutions for quality performance metrics, shop floor data management, material resource planning, financial visibility and earned-value management, leading indicators to prevent waste, and automation solutions to provide a lean workflow.
Raytheon’s IT Team is also developing data integrity solutions in virus reduction technologies and system architecture solutions and capabilities that provide the RAMP SPEED that enables the company to maintain a competitive industry advantage in wireless solutions, workflow management, and real-time work center metrics displays. In addition to establishing these near-term objectives, IT is actively engaged in the strategic planning process to meet its JBI objective and has identified the following objectives that provide value-added benefits to IDS strategic plans:
Joint information capabilities enhanced through networking infrastructure solutions
Collaborative solutions and mature IDE to allow more robust information-sharing over various networking solutions
Global reach that permits robust support for different remote Raytheon facilities regardless of limitations imposed by the local infrastructure
Network security that addresses emerging threats and new operational models
Information integration that strives to reduce the number of supported applications with a select group of applications offering better interoperability
Developing critical skill sets in personnel
The IT strategic approach has proven effective in identifying those projects that meet the requirements of the Integrated Product Development System (IPDS), a Raytheon approach to system and program development, and demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) while ensuring that IT solutions are tested to determine their ability to meet partner expectations, increasing the likelihood they will be considered effective in meeting customer needs.
The alignment of Raytheon’s IT Strategic Plan with Six Sigma projects is process-centric, focusing on operational excellence and improved information and communication flow. The implementation of the IT strategy has improved technology efficiency to give Raytheon the ramp speed necessary to maintain the company’s competitive industry edge.
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