Technology Intervention Case Studies

 Background

The SDO was housed in a separate facility 30 miles north of the main campus which housed all other business organizations. Unfortunately there was very little interaction between the SDO and the other executives. The leadership of the SDO had been acquired a few years earlier and had focused much of the development resources using proprietary technology which had been acquired.

One of the major initiatives was to develop a new data base that contained all of the global information that was then contained in three separate data bases. The new data base had gone thought more than 20 iterations over more than a year and not even the first of the three underlying data bases had been accommodated into the new design.

Unfortunately a very important new product was dependent on the new data base schema and its release was already 18 months behind schedule. Furthermore, the size of the new structure was estimated to be 4 terabytes whereas the three underlying data bases were, in total, less than 400 gigabytes. This estimate meant that the full system implementation would require a total of 20 terabytes (four each for the production, development, test, stage and backup environments.)

Decisions in the first 100 Days

Within a short period of time the decision was made to close the facility and relocate everyone to the main campus. In preparation of the move I met with every colleague to describe the move and its value for the company. As part of each of these discussions I confirmed to each person that there was no “hidden agenda” to reduce staff and we were committed to ease the travel burden as much as possible. The end result was then every employee from the old facility was still with the company 2 years later.

Unfortunately I also determined that the technology that had been acquired a few years earlier was not suitable for the tasks necessary to develop the data base and product and I could not see a path to a successful product. Subsequently all related efforts were discontinued. This required that the product be architected using a more conventional data base approach which was done in the next few months. Within a few weeks an existing product was re-architected and became the basis for a successful product launch about a year later.