This case is about aligning IT with business objectives and picks up with Danielle Savoie’s appointment to lead IT at Cirque du Soleil. At the time, Cirque was making efforts to “professionalize” its management while preserving its creativity

March 27, 2019

Session #1 Notes, Part Deux
This week you are doing your first case study. You might be wondering what to do with this specific case, so I am offering the following guidance:
1. Synopsis: This case is about aligning IT with business objectives and picks up with Danielle Savoie’s appointment to lead IT at Cirque du Soleil. At the time, Cirque was making efforts to “professionalize” its management while preserving its creativity. It was a very successful enterprise that had grown rapidly. Cirque had five road shows touring the world, three permanent shows (also known as resident shows) in the USA, regional offices on three continents, and headquarters in Montreal. In terms of IT, the situation is described in the case as “being typical of a small business that has grown rapidly and devoted all its resources to the development of its core business.” This translates into the presence of numerous, incompatible hardware platforms, the concurrent use of several versions of sometimes incompatible operating systems, a large number of uncatalogued special-purpose applications, and a complete lack of standardization. Savoie’s main challenge was to determine how IT could best serve Cirque.
2. Management Challenges: Savoie had two primary challenges. First, she had accepted a position in an organization with a culture very different from that of her former organization. The second challenge was how to deal with the consequences of the extremely rapid growth at Cirque du Soleil.
3. Current Environment: Cirque is a classic example of a small company that has been very successful and has grown rapidly. This leads to multiple solutions (hardware/software/process) that are different, non-standard and often incompatible with each other. This is detailed in the section, Information Technology at Cirque du Soleil in 2000. Things were running okay with this mixed bag of technology, but that was largely due to creative IT personnel. List the details of the current environment in your paper

BTW, I made a fine career of going into small to medium companies in this situation. I’d be appointed acting CIO and would access the situation, redesign the IT environment into a single standardized image, implement the solution and then go my merry way. It usually took four to eight months.)
4. So what to do? The strategic plan going forward is, “Establish IT solution requirements to support and enable respective business visions for Cirque du Soleil service and products & work functions requiring significant IT support during the next two to three years.” This is Savoie’s broad recommendation. Does it make sense? What are the details? Would you do it differently? List the details in your analysis. Feel free to develop the plan using current technology.
5. Implementation: How would you implement such a plan? Geographically? By show type? All-at-once? Phased?
6. Look at the Cirque web site to see what they are doing today, does that change your mind about the solution set?

Given all that, the paper could look like the following:
Executive Summary: This will look a lot like the synopsis above, a high-level overview.
Defining the Issues: See #2 and #3 above. Talk about strategic alignment of IT and business objectives.
Analyzing the Case Data: There isn’t a lot of data in this case. Define the current environment in detail (#3). What is this an issue? Here you can talk about things like the variety of networks, operating systems, applications, etc. Why is this not a good thing? What problems come from each of these areas? How might it lead to problems in the future? Is this configuration of hardware, software, personnel and processes well aligned to Cirque’s business objectives? If not, why not?
Recommendations: See #4 for the big picture. How should she do this? What would be involved? How should it be implemented? Feel free to use current technology in your proposed solution.
Exhibits: You might have an exhibit of a phased solution, with details on what is added & when. If you are so inclined, you might put together a quick proposed architecture drawing, but this is not expected, just an example. It could be that you do not have any exhibits at all.

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