Technology Intervention Case Studies
A Large Distribution Company (LDC)
Background
LDC had revenues in the range of $8 billion. The company operated on a COBOL-based mainframe system. The company used about 5,000 CRT displays, all of which were directly connected to the mainframe through an extensive global network. These CRT's were used to manage inventories, enter orders, arrange for and track shipments, and all aspects of the company's financial activities.
As part of the company's public offering, it committed to the SEC that it would separate its mainframe operations and other aspects of its infrastructure from those of the company's previous parent company.
The CIO at the time of the intervention believed that he and members of his executive team should spend at least two hours a day programming COBOL in the production system. He also had determined that only “dumb” terminals would be purchased by the company and that PC's were “nothing more than toys.” This meant that there would be no capability for colleagues to access the every growing content on the internet.
In addition to LDC's continued dependencies on the previous parent company's data center, there was no disaster planning being done.
Decisions in the first 100 days
The directive that IT executives spend time each day programming COBOL was rescinded and the executive were encouraged to exercise their leadership skills to ensure that the Chairman's aspiration that company grow to $30 billion within five years was attainable.
A new network and infrastructure executive was brought into the company with the specific responsibility for moving all of LDC's data processing to a new data center and getting network activities off of the previous parent company's.
The company also began to purchase PC's and color displays for new employees as revenues continued to grow. This decision was based on the assumption that new systems would be better enabled by these more flexible devices. The appropriateness of this decision was confirmed when the company installed a suite of Oracle financial modules several months later.
Within 100 days we also launched a very serious initiative to develop and business continuity plan even though the company continued to use the parent company data center for a year longer.