Request+for+new+reporting+structure

 Widgets Unlimited! ** To: ** Allan Sergeant, CEO **From:** Angela Rupert, IT Department Manager
 * Memo:** Request for new reporting structure **Date:** 9/29/10

Cc: Austin Sweeney, CFO 

After discussing with Austin Sweeney about some of the communication problems that the IT department has been facing recently, we have come to the mutual agreement that the IT Department Manager would best be suited for a new reporting structure directly to the CEO. Miscommunication caused our order for 48 new executive lap tops to be sent to our sister factory in Mexico City. The executives were most appreciative of the gesture and Austin and I just didn’t have the heart to ask the staff to pack up the laptops and send them out here. By the time we identified the mistake, the Mexican IT department had already donated the old laptops to priests at a missionary school in the Aztec jungle. In May, our department picked up an intern from the local University. While I was on vacation, the intern received information from the CFO to the Accounting department manager to the Administrative assistant that they had been hired to reprogram a customer database in C+ instead of C++. The intern was intimidated by the assignment and promptly dropped out of school. Had the assignment been filtered directly through the IT department, the miscommunication would never have happened. Most recently, I was not invited to the executive meeting to hear about the problems with accessing our Citrix system. The information I had received was that everyone was having a difficult time logging in because of their passwords. We had to reassign login ID’s and Passwords to 3500 employees. This cost our department about two weeks of labor and production for much of the company was delayed. Had I been at the meeting I would have been able to identify that the cause of the problem was really due to an internal error on the Citrix server. This internal error could have been easily fixed with a three minute patch caused when we had upgraded system browsers to IE8. The common complaints from the department heads would have clued me into that the IE8 upgrade was the real issue. Instead I received a memo stating that it was a password problem and a security breach. Austin Sweeney and I have come to the mutual agreement that the company would be best served if the IT manager reported directly to the CEO. Austin can concentrate more on the business side and be less likely to miscommunicate information. I can be more efficient in my position by directly reporting to you and attending all of the executive meetings to be sure to answer questions and troubleshoot problems as we go along. Fewer errors mean better production!