Reflection on Harley Davidson

Harley Davidson, founded in 1903, is one of the oldest and most well known producers of motorcycles in the U.S. The name is known worldwide. Being in the business and a successful company for over 100 years with employees of over 10,000 and steadily increasing revenue which is over $5billion; it is safe to say that they know what they are doing and they have been doing it right for a long time now. However, the CIO felt it necessary to try and restructure the IT internal controls because they might be outdated.

         Given the case analysis and presentation from our consultant last week, I would suggest that it was not necessary to immediately jump straight to that decision and first try to see how the infrastructure could be built from the inside out.

         It was clear after comparing the current controls to those of the COBIT framework, that there were issues. Right there I as the CIO, I would recommend that we start working on an implementation strategy to try and align our procedures to accordance with all the stringent control requirements. The control procedure would be revamped to display the new IT control framework. Weekly meetings and monthly internal audits would be tested to ensure that we are on track.

         I do not think the suggestion to hire consultants and automatically incur thousands of dollars in outside service fees is the correct first step to follow. We formed a new IT compliance department and uncovered our problematic areas. We discovered a good framework to follow and the last step is to implement and test. All this done in house.