Blaming technology is an easy target when business fails

The company was a pioneer in adoption of technology for a long time; this was facilitated by a visionary business leader who believed that IT will make the difference when every other aspect of business had been copied by competitors. Thus he pushed the enterprise to invest in technology which none in the industry had deployed; they did not succeed all the time, but he continued to push on, challenging not just the business team, he also nudged the IT team to take risks and come up with new opportunities to grow the business.

As the company grew, so did competition expanding the market as well as taking advantage of newer technologies. That did not take away the advantage of process and technology maturity from the early adopter; with new leaders taking on the primary mantle of business, they however did not pick up pace that was necessary in the face of new paradigms of business. Leadership change made decision making shift to lower risk model for new projects and doing more of what made them successful in the past.

A shift occurred when a new CIO was hired to replace the exiting IT leader who had lost interest due to change in organization dynamics and the fact that he had lost connect with the business. With the new came wave of expectations; he got off the ground running and had the IT team charged up with his collaborative approach. Business also loved his connect, can-do attitude and the ability to get things moving; he established credibility with projects that were deemed difficult and path breaking in the industry.

The project was neither innovative nor first for the industry, but its scope impacted the entire business and company reputation. The CIO worked with the business head to present the case to the management and then the Board. They were given an in-principle approval but with a low-risk caveat attached to keep investment to the barest minimum. Even if it does not work, we will not be too much out of pocket. So the investment schedule was changed along with the solution to adapt to set expectations.

Since the project required cross-functional collaboration, they had difficulty in aligning everyone to the goal which stretched timelines and budget a bit. Coaxing and cajoling the non-believers, they managed to get off the ground and launched the new business. Ramp up was slow and steady as business slowly found traction with customers; the peak during the following festive season broke the process as they faced the ire of customers and internal teams who were stressed by the additional workload.

Learning from the incident, root cause indicated the nonchalant behavior of the unaligned as the primary reason. The CEO unwilling to acknowledge the failure by the business team blamed the technology and implementation partner seeking a change to an alternative solution. With no recourse, the team reluctantly moved on to evaluate a better system which would help them scale up and also meet expectations; the caveat remained this time around also, do more with less, we cannot invest too much.

Usual project travails and a year later, the new system found light of day; newer technology comes with new features which were expected to provide better capability to the business teams. Some of the non-believers converted and joined the wave which made good addition to their resumes. Since the root cause was not fully addressed, the next big surge created problems of larger proportions, also impacting the brand apart from loss of business; the ostrich CEO fired the team and decided to go to market again for a better solution !

The new team wiser to history took cautious steps towards selection of the new solution going with global leaders, unwilling to try any other approach. They patiently waited for budget approvals and the cross-functional team to be formed that would drive the project along with the technology team. They chose the best of implementation partners, collectively turning it into the mother of all projects for the company. With the large budget the CEO was under pressure to deliver the project right third time, the Board demanding results.

From the first attempt to the one now, the gap was close to a decade; competition had risen with the waves, many had fallen too. Customers had evolved expecting better experience, service and bargains. Changeover took some effort, the new platform was deployed with new capability and expectation of higher business. The large investment rankled somewhere, the Board expecting commensurate returns in a fast growing market. The business teams continued their other lives while the platform struggled.

Internal process alignment, market dynamics and customers finally decide success; the CEO was heard blaming the tool again !

The Chicken and the Egg

They traveled the seven seas in a small group looking wide and far for the ultimate solution to beat all solutions and their competitors. Visiting software solution providers and their customers, the team ensured that they explored all the nuances of the solution as used by their hosts. It was a search spread over many months and millions of frequent flyer miles. They came back with voluminous notes which were put together to create the decision matrix. A winner emerged from the chaos; it was the current market leader.

The team was excited with the prospects of implementing the world’s best solution; they presented their conclusions to the management using business case formulated on vendor provided parameters and some internal thinking. Despite the high investment required, management accepted the widely used solution considering that alternatives were not even known by name. The system integrator and implementation partner who had worked through the journey celebrated the decision along with the team.

The team chosen from business, IT and the vendor made preparations and started the project as a cohesive group with broadly defined timelines. It was perceived to be easy with clear use cases and the fact that current manual process was riddled with inefficiency. Lagging competitors by many years, the team and everyone around acknowledged the need and urgency. Well begun is half done, so goes an old English saying; that applied quite appropriately to this marquee project which had all the ingredients that consultants and wise men talk about.

Months passed by in the requirement gathering phases and everything was hunky dory; the rigor of the business team was highly appreciated. Some more months passed by, the team was still in discussion on feature fit to the future state process. Exceptions were highlighted and the system expected to cater to these. The implementation partner was getting restless. Another couple of months later there were no conclusions on the final process; the IT team raised a red flag to the CIO, users reciprocated with an escalation to the functional head.

A senior functional resource was brought in to resolve the bottlenecks; he quickly realized that the users were attempting to force fit their existing processes into the new system. The group had challenges in understanding the basics features of the system despite multiple rounds of demonstrations and step by step explanations. Their lacked the ability to define new optimized processes and with no interest in changing the process they kept shifting the goalpost. Soon it was evident chances of success were like water on Mars.

The SME decided to unearth documents that were the foundation of the product selection. The going in comparison set was not a portrayal of the future state but a broad level definition of the function which obviously met every systems checklist. The selection was based on market positioning and market share in their industry. Almost everyone was using it and thus the decision was kind of obvious. It did not need the process that was adopted to determine the tools. The lack of focus on process from the beginning led to the current situation.

What comes first, process or technology ? Should an organization determine the future state before attempting to select a tool or follow the process that this company did of finding the best tool and then try to figure out how to make it work ? If technology is indeed subservient to business and process, then the journey traversed by the team had a fallacy; even when choices are limited as was the case again, should the process take precedence over technology ? The savior understood the problem and solved it quickly to get the project back on track.

The Knight in shining armor took some difficult decisions and changed some resources while staying involved with the rest focusing on what mattered. He separated the critical and the important while parking the good and nice to have. Exceptions will be addressed when they occur, let’s move on with the 99%. Suddenly everything started moving and though delayed they were back on track. Given the situation I believe that it does not matter which comes first in the poultry farm; it is about where you want to go.

The organization acknowledged the fact, “People are not your best assets, the right people are !” and that’s a story for another time.