Delivering Business Value with IT at Hefty Hardware The Hefty Hardware case study shows a typical lack of interdepartmental communication, between key business units and the IT department. Managers and stakeholders are unable to estimate the value that the IT department brings to the company's business and tend to neglect or diminish it; the IT team, on the other hand, fails to comprehensibly communicate its milestones, technological challenges, and incompatibilities when implementing new projects and other aspects of IT operation. The company's CIO's recent suggestion is to bring some managers and IT department heads into the field to see first-hand how Hefty Hardware stores operate from the inside. Also, how can you use this insight to improve your current ERP implementation or, in general, your company's IT infrastructure, policies and procedures. Unfortunately, this suggestion has serious drawbacks, which we will discuss in the following paragraphs. First, the typical well-known solution to such problems is to hire a business consultant, IT consultant or IT and communication consultant. These are professionals capable of solving some types of widespread problems such as ineffective communication between departments, reducing deficiencies in business and IT procedures, deficiencies in business management techniques and, finally, facilitating an effective transfer of knowledge between business units . Without a consultant, Hefty Hardware's various departments play the role of “consultant” or “client” – for example, representatives from the IT team consult company management on technical issues related to the implementation of a newly proposed marketing project. According to Dong-Gil... half of the document... nced scorecard. References Dong-Gil Ko, Kirsch, L. J., & King, W. R. (2005). Antecedents of knowledge transfer from consultants to clients in enterprise system implementations. MIS Quarterly, 29(1), 59–85. Hayes, N., & Westrup, C. (2014). Consultants as intermediaries and mediators in the construction of information and communication technologies for development. Information Technologies and International Development, 10(2), 19–32.Murby, L., Gould, S., (2005). Effective performance management with the Balanced Scorecard. Technical Report, CIMA, London.Smith, H.A., McKeen J.D. (2012). Delivering business value with IT at Hefty Hardware. IT Strategy: Issues and Practices (2nd ed.) Pearson Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ. Vielhaber, M. E., & Waltman, J. L. (2008). Changing the uses of technology. Journal of Business Communication, 45(3), 308–330. Works cited