Table of Contents
Executive Summary 2
Introduction 2
Core Issues 3
Diagnosis 3
Competing Values Framework 3
Evaluation of the Lessons 5
Recommendations 7
Appendix 8
Bibliography 10

Executive Summary
CareGroup is a result of a merger between three prominent and large hospitals that include, Beth Israel, Deaconess, and Mount Auburn Hospital. Although the major objective of this merger is to cater the vast population of the region with medical facilities; the first factor that encouraged this merger is the growing trend of merger in the industry, the price war in the industry is becoming highly complex and cost as a combined effort help hospitals to cut the cost significantly and deliver quality that will help them to improve immensely.
The major issue that the company is facing is regarding the network collapse that happened due to the improper efforts of a researcher while experimenting with an application. Furthermore, the role of the researcher while testing the new software, the employees that tried to handle the situation without sufficient knowledge, the dependency on the guru and the improper and outdated back system, played a vital role in making the situation more complex for the company. However, in order to tackle these issues or any such issues related to the company’s network is suggested to follow four methods that will help in reducing these issues.
The four suggestions include seeking help from external experts in handling network that will be more effective and time-saving as well. Furthermore, the company should upgrade its knowledge and stay connected with current practices in the business world. Secondly, the company is recommended to develop a continuing business and improvement process to stay connected with the competition and compete in a more proper manner. Lastly, risk assessment is important for the company as it will allow the company to mitigate risks.
Introduction
CareGroup is a result of a merger between three prominent and large hospitals that include, Beth Israel, Deaconess, and Mount Auburn Hospital. These three large medical institutions effectively collaborated with each other in forming this new organization in Eastern Massachusetts in the year 1996. Although the major aim of forming this organization is to cater the vast population of the region with medical facilities, however, there were three key factors that became the basis for forming this organization. The organization originally started operations with an objective to deliver support to the physicians and hospitals in the form of a care delivery system.
However, with the passage of time the organization has improved and evolved to become a confederation model that supports its affiliates with an opportunity to share some common services. The affiliates have the feasibility to use these services by either borrowing or purchasing. On the other hand, the organization has a decentralized structure that is committed to delivering quality and safety regarding patient care. As the organization is a result of a merger, therefore, the IT department of the organization made maximum efforts to bring integration between every department at every facility. The need for creating such a network was important and vital and with significant efforts a desired IT network was created. This network allowed every hospital involved in the formation of the organization to share a common system. This system later on became one of the most efficient IT systems in the industry and was regarded as the most advanced and effective network system in the country.
Core Issues
The major issue that the company finds itself facing is the network collapse that happened due to the improper efforts of a researcher while experimenting with an application that commands files are sharing. This issue later on became highly uncontrollable as it allowed terabytes of data to move easily across the network by copying data from surrounding networks in large volumes. The company is facing challenges in coping with this situation and the situation became worse after a few individuals tried to overcome the issue of handling the network. This situation eventually forced the company to seek external aid and the CIO immediately called CISCO for assistance. The chief information officer of the company is under real consideration for a solution to handle this situation properly. While doing so, he has learned a myriad of lessons that can be vital to developing suitable recommendations.
Diagnosis
This portion will diagnose the current situation and the events that played a vital role in framing the issue and bringing the organization into its current situation. The issue of the network collapse has occurred due to a series of incidents, and many players, or people are involved in this situation. In order to analyze the situation, the competing value framework will be used to identify the causes of the issue and what are the major provocations towards the scenario.
Competing Values Framework
The CVF framework has four quadrants that include competing, collaborate, control and create. Each quadrant has different dimensions that are important to fill in order to identify the right quadrant for the issue. The issue faced by the company has significant importance as the network collapse destroyed the integration between the hospitals and different units; therefore, the issue lies in the quadrant of collaborate. While assessing the situation in the collaborate quadrant, the purpose of the organization, the practices that led to frame this issue and the people involved in the scenario will be identified and discussed (Kim S. Cameron).
Purpose
The purpose of the organization is to bring stability in their information system and alleviate the network collapse that the company is facing in order to bring the activities back on track. The company’s mission is to deliver quality service to the patient that also needs to be quick and safe. In order to achieve this objective stability in the IT, network is important for the company as it allows integration and helps in running the operations smoothly. Stability in the network guides the organization in transferring information easily and makes the flow of information fast.
Practices
There are certain events or practices of people in the organization that caused a series of events and played a vital role in shaping this issue. The first and the most important event is the experimentation done by a researcher that created the network collapse. The researcher started testing the application for knowledge management designed to share files, but somehow due to some urgency, he left the process incomplete and left the file running. The file can transfer data at a large extent after locating the data. The data began to transfer across the network and in a while terabytes of data were running across the network causing a major issue for the IT department.
The issue became so vital that the IT department had to take some major steps in order to fix the situation as the organization was left with no alternative options to transfer information. The organization opted for manual techniques of transferring and managing information like notepads and telephones. As a whole, the company went back to the old methods of handling the organization and most of the employees that are young are not aware of such techniques.
In order to maintain the quality of the service and safety of the patients, the organization provided crash courses to the employees to make them aware of the old-fashioned methods or the generic methods quickly. Furthermore, few people from the team tried to identify the causes of the issue and went on to improve the situation without any consultation. The certain attempts of some employees to resolve the issue made it more complex and did not helped in solving the issue.
The CIO contacted CISCO, a company designed to resolve the issue related to IT and networking. The CISCO team identified that the system used by CareGroup is outdated and needed to be replaced. CISCO made it quite clear to the management that the backup system is quite outdated and will not be easy to fix as some major components and parts are missing.
However, the company has only one networking guru who also left, which placed the company in a rather difficult situation. The importance of networking guru is high as he is the only one who can handle such crucial situations, and the company is quite dependent on him. His departure made the company quite weak as they did not have anyone from the organization to replace him or do not have access to any other person who can replace him at a very short notice. This dependency of the company also played a vital role in making the issue more complex and situation worse.
People
The people involved in this situation include John Hamaka, who is the Chief Information Officer of the organization and maintaining network stability is his prime task. Besides that, there is no significant person involved in this issue, and it is John who is affected by the issue most and is seeking the solution.
Evaluation of the Lessons
The first lesson that John learned is about bringing external help to solve issues or seeking experts to configure the network more properly, and the organization should hesitate in doing so. This is an important lesson as every organization may face crucial challenges or issues that are quite complex and the company cannot possess every skill to tackle every issue. However, the company can spend on learning new techniques and hiring more employees to handle such issues whenever they arise. This can be a costly decision, therefore, organizations should seek help from experts outside the company and as they possess abilities to tackle such issues; their presence will be more helpful.
The second lesson is regarding dependency and it guides that organizations must not be dependent on a single employee for any activity and must possess a replacement. The organizations should hire more than one employee to handle every function as it will reduce dependency and will also guide in addressing issues with more comfort. As the organization had only a single network guru who left at a crucial time, therefore, this made the situation more complex. However, if the company had more than one network gurus, then the problem could have been tackled more appropriately.
The organization must update its systems and should remain up to date at every level in order to be more convenient to handle. This is the third lesson, and it explains that the working knowledge must be according to the current period as it allows the organizations to compete more strongly and operate more smoothly. However, the next lesson indicates that the firm should ensure that the researchers that are involved in experimentation must complete their task and handle every new technology with proper care. This is important as it will help in avoiding such situations in the future and will acknowledge more advances.
On the other hand, maintaining rigorous network change control can be effective and as the company initiated efforts by creating a control board who can handle and monitor the change in the networks more appropriately. This can be vital in the future and will help the company in implementing any change in the network more appropriately and thoroughly. However, putting limits on a customer-centric approach instead of treating it as an individual lesson must be incorporated into the change control process as it also talks about change in the network.
The lesson regarding adopting externalities is related to the third lesson of keeping up to date knowledge. This lesson also talks about remaining aware of the external environment and as keeping up-to-date in terms of knowledge, the company will have to view the external environment to learn new techniques and methods. This will obviously help in assessing the external environment and handling issues more closely. Besides that, the company must have backup plans or procedures that are trustworthy and should provide assistance in somewhat similar manner. This is important as unreliable backup procedures will make the situation even more complex in case of any issue.
However, the next lesson regarding component redundancy is also related closely to the previous lesson of having an alternate method that must be reliable. The relation is apparent as having extra components is also part of a backup plan and having up to date and reliable components are important for developing a strong backup. On the other hand, the last lesson of managing the life cycle of the network components is important, and it can be incorporated into the third lesson of keeping up-to-date knowledge. The IT department must ensure that the components are new and upgraded regularly in order to avoid such situations.

Recommendations
Need of External Experts
The company is recommended to seek experts like CISCO in case of any such issue related to the network. The significance of this move is that it will allow the company to handle the issues more properly and carefully by allowing experts to take the charge. Besides that, it will help in saving time and bring the system back on track without any further complexities. Secondly, this move will also help in evaluating and auditing the network system of the company and will make the company aware of its flaws. However, this move can be costly and can expose the company’s flaws in the network to an external authority (Michael Lewis).
Keep Knowledge Up-to-Date
Maintaining up-to-date knowledge is important in order to stay connected with the modern world techniques and enhance the network system with the passage of time. This will allow the company to serve the customers more effectively and stay competitive for a longer period. However, the access to the latest knowledge and techniques is not an easy task and can generate huge financial burden on the company (Paul Quintas).
Proper control over Change
The business processes are subjected to change with the passage of time, and the company should maintain an extensive change process that can incorporate the company with the changes in its operations and business processes. This move will allow the company to change continuously and become competitive and easily differentiate it from the competitors. Also, the business process and the network of the company can be upgraded properly through a proper change control system (Lawrence R. Walker and F. Stuart Chapin). (Exhibit 2)
Risk Assessment
The company should develop a risk assessment team that will help in addressing the future risks and will generate plans to handle the issues expected to occur. Also, it will guide in mitigating the expected risks that the company can face (Koller).

Appendix 1
Recommendations

Appendix 2
Business Process Improvement

Bibliography
Kim S. Cameron, Robert E. Quinn. Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework. John Wiley & Sons,, 2011.
Koller, Glenn. Risk Assessment and Decision Making in Business and Industry: A Practical Guide, Second Edition. CRC Press,, 2005.
Lawrence R. Walker and F. Stuart Chapin, III. “Interactions among Processes Controlling Successional Change.” Oikos (1987): 131-135.
Michael Lewis, Nigel Slack. Operations Management. Psychology Press,, 2003.
Paul Quintas, Paul Lefrere, Geoff Jones. “Knowledge management: A strategic agenda.” Long Range Planning (1997): 385–391.