1. Describe the problem at IFG as succinctly as you can. Use this description to identify the main stakeholders. 2. IFG can’t afford the resources to identify, define, cleanse, and validate all of its

Mini Case

Consumerization of Technology at IFG3

“There’s good news and bad news,” Josh Novak reported to the assembled IT management team at their monthly status meeting. “The good news is that our social

media traffic is up 3000% in the past two years. Our new interactive website, Facebook

presence,and our U-Tube and couponing promotions have been highly successful in

driving awareness of our ‘Nature’s Glow’ brand and are very popular with our target

demographic—the under-30s. Unfortunately, the bad news is that our competitors at

GPL are eating our lunch with the new mobile apps they’ve developed.”

Everyone frowned at the mention of Grocers’ Products Limited, their fiercest competitor,

which had the largest chain of integrated food and retail stores in the country

and whose Premier Choice products were showcased on their shelves, making it

increasingly harder for IFG to get prime space for their top brands.

“Our web and social media presence has helped us to begin to develop a relationship

with our customers,” Josh continued, “but our Marketing folks are very worried

that we’re going to be falling behind, isn’t that so Tonya?”

Tonya James, manager of IT Marketing, nodded her head. As the IT person working

directly with marketing, it had been under her watch that IFG had transformed its

dowdy online presence into something that was hip and trendy. Together, she and Josh,

now manager of IT Innovation, had begun experimenting with new media, creating an

innovation process that took a large number of new technologies and ideas for products

and services and created a protected “sand box” that enabled trial implementations for

employees only. Feedback and experience at this level then helped Josh and his business

colleagues select the best ones for development in full “heavy-duty” production

mode for the public, complete with privacy and security protection and following all

architectural standards. Only then would the chief technology officer, Rick Visser, who

was charged with protecting company data and systems, allow new technologies to be

fully integrated into IFG’s internal technical environment.

Mark Szabo, the newly appointed head of IFG’s Business Intelligence (BI) team

reported next. “As you all know, our executives are all screaming for more and more

information to help them but it’s not going to be easy. What we have here at IFG is a

data mess and it’s only going to get worse from what I can see.” The picture wasn’t

pretty he warned. IFG had thousands of traditional systems all of which produced data

and reports. The problem was that each used somewhat different definitions of important

company concepts, like “in stock.”

“If our goal is to improve the stocks of our products on the shelves, we’ll have to

go back to rewrite many of these systems. Some of them believe that a product is ‘in

stock’ when it’s on the shelves; others when it’s in our back room waiting to be put on

the shelves; still others when we have received the order from the supplier or when it’s

arrived at our regional distribution centers.” He went on to describe similar problems

with varying understandings of such core company data as “customer,” “supplier,”

“employee,” and others. “It’s hard to tell our executives how ‘sales’ are going when we

don’t have a single definition of what ‘sales’ are!” he said with frustration. “Right now,

I’ve got two people working full time on spreadsheets trying to reconcile data to answer

the questions we continually get from the 37th floor,” he concluded referring to the

executive suite. “We can’t tell them we don’t have the information but we need a better

way to get it, that’s for sure.”

The meeting droned on with the CIO, John Ahern, calling on all his managers one

at a time. As far as most of them were concerned, it was “business as usual” in IT. Josh

didn’t say anything else in the meeting but he cornered Mark as it broke up. “Have you

got time for a coffee? I think we need to talk.”

“Sure, what’s up?,” Mark asked as they headed toward the company cafeteria.

“I liked what you had to say in the meeting about BI,” said Josh. “You seem to be

one of the few managers here who understands that what we do in IT is going to have

to change dramatically over the next few years. And that a lot of our work is going to

focus on information—getting it; analyzing it; and delivering it in packages that people

can use for their work. I believe that there’s a data tsunami rapidly heading our way

and we haven’t got a clue how to deal with it.”

Mark grimaced as he filled his cup with what the cafeteria called “coffee.” “I know,

I know,” he agreed. “I’ve only been in BI a couple of months but all those articles and

books out there about competing on analytics and analyzing unstructured data, like

emails and tweets and blogs, are making my head spin. If we can’t agree on what a

‘customer’ is, how are we ever going to manage the rest?”

Josh made a sympathetic face. “You’ve got that right, but I’m afraid it’s even worse

than you think.” Over the next thirty minutes he described what he was seeing

out in the

field as he looked for innovative new technologies and applications that could help IFG.

“You think we have problems with our existing systems, but there are guys out

there in our business units buying full-scale applications from the cloud with company

credit cards!” He went on to tell Mark about the pressure he was getting from the sales

guys to buy everyone iPads so they could write up orders on the road. “We’ve already

been forced by our C-team to buy them and the board iPads and so far, we’ve kept them

locked down tightly, but that’s going to change very soon.”

Users were also creating local “data marts,” which included copies of core company

data as well as external data feeds, and then building complex spreadsheets with

information derived from these.

“Our business units don’t use the centralized company reports anymore,” he

stated. “They create their own. We’ve got the ‘wild west’ out there!”

Mark looked shocked. “What about our company data warehouse? Isn’t that what

they’re supposed to use?” He had spent a few years building the warehouse a while

back and the team had put a lot of thought into making it the best they could.

Josh was aware of this but ploughed on. He and Mark needed to be on the same

page about this if these issues were ever going to be resolved. “The world has changed,”

he said gently. “Our business guys are online all the time now; software vendors are

targeting them directly and because of the low costs involved they can afford to make an

end run around IT; there are literally thousands of free data sets out there; and computing

power and storage cost aren’t an issue any more with the cloud. Our data warehouse is

seen as a dinosaur. It’s inflexible because we insist on reviewing all the data that goes in

there for quality and provenance and it takes forever (i.e., 30 seconds) to get a response.”

Mark looked down at the table and sighed. “So what you’re saying is that all my

work in BI is too little, too late?”

Josh thought for a moment before replying. “That’s not exactly what I’ve been

saying,

Mark. What I meant to point out is that we in IT are caught in the middle between

two opposing trends. The first is the trend to analytics and business intelligence

that

you’re working on. That’s important. The execs want to get at more information to run

the company and it has to be based on good, trustworthy data. There are whole businesses

out there that are winning because they’ve found a way to do this.

But the other, opposite trend is what I’m seeing. And it’s important too. Everyone

working in our business is also a consumer of technology and when the devices and

applications they can use in their personal lives are more powerful and flexible than those

in their business lives, they naturally want to work around the clunky technology we

provide them with and use their own. And, since we’re now trying to build relationships

with our customers, we are going to have to start thinking and working like they do.”

“In some ways, this is just like the ‘old days’ in IT,” Mark smiled. “I’m a lot older

than you and I remember when those new-fangled PCs came in and everyone in IT was

worrying about how we were going to handle people working on their own computers

at home. And then when the web first hit business, we had people running around

saying

‘the sky is falling’ and developing their own personal and localized websites. We

don’t handle new stuff well around here, do we?”

Josh grinned. He was notoriously frustrated with the IT “powers that be” that

always wanted to lock everything down and wrap it in layers of privacy and security

before allowing it out there. “Well, let’s just say that we’ve got some way to go before

I believe we can be as innovative as I’d like us to be. We’ve got to be aware of these

trends and how they’re going to hit us. Or our business model could change and we’ll

be out in the cold. Where are all the book stores, video stores and music stores these

days? What happened to those companies?”

“You’re right of course,” said Mark “but we have to get more people involved

in figuring out what we need to do here. This is a HUGE issue and we can’t ‘boil the

ocean’! Somehow we need to get our arms around the most important things to do so

we can make some sort of progress. Otherwise, we’re spinning our wheels and the situation’s

just going to grow more and more out of control.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Josh. “Let me speak with Tonya. She’s terrific at stickhandling

these situations. I’ll get back to you with a plan.” And with that, they began to

talk about the upcoming company softball game as they cleared the table and headed

back to their respective cubicles. recognize that the business is likely already doing their own thing on the cloud without IT

and using their own personal devices, because it’s so cheap and easy to do and we don’t

help them! If we don’t somehow figure out how all this stuff fits together—especially the

data—we’ll never be able to use what we know either operationally or strategically.”

“You’ve done a good job articulating the challenges we’re facing,” Tonya said.

“I know that the Marketing people are putting lots of pressure on me to help them with

better information and tools. In my experience, when business is in turmoil they want

everything right away and they’ll do whatever it takes to get it now. What would you

say our biggest need is right now?”

Josh fiddled with his pen for a moment. He had hoped Tonya would tell him.

“Well . . .,” he said slowly. “We need to be seen to be doing more in this space. It’s okay to

work on the big systems and core data. In fact, that’s our main job. But we also need to

help the business help itself. With my tiny innovation team, I can’t possibly deal with all

of the ideas and technologies that are out there. And the business guys are seeing many

more opportunities than I can deal with. It’s really hard to tell what’s going to work

and what isn’t until they play with things. I can provide some of this in my ‘innovation

sandbox’ but I don’t think that’s going to be enough. And . . .,” he said as another idea

popped into his head, “we don’t have the right people to do some of this work. We need

information analysts, mobile developers, visualization specialists and lots of business

people to work with us and teach us about the business. I don’t have all the answers

here but we can’t stick our heads in the sand and let the world change around us. Are

we going to be reactionary or visionary?”

Tonya smiled. “There’s never a dull moment around here is there? You’ve got an

important point of view here but I think Rick Visser does too. Just in IT alone, we’ve got

a number of groups that need to have some input on this, in addition to my area. We

have to get ahead of this ‘tsunami’ of yours and be proactive in a way we’ve never been

before. This doesn’t mean that we throw all our tried and true practices out the window

but it also means that we should do some things differently around here and that means

John has to be involved. We need a plan to manage all these new trends and he’s in the

best position to help us because there are going to be a lot of cultural, organizational

and structural changes involved, not just for IT but for the whole business. But we can’t

dump this in his lap. We need to do our homework first. I’ll talk with him and tell him

what we’re doing and try to identify the stakeholders involved. Can you come up with

some key issues and preliminary recommendations about what you think we should be

doing and how we should do it? Sit down with Mark and get his ideas too. Then we’ll

see if we can get everyone in a room together to ‘talk turkey’ and hammer out a more

proactive IT strategy for handling this mess.”

Discussion Questions

1. Describe the problem at IFG as succinctly as you can. Use this description to identify the main stakeholders.

2. IFG can’t afford the resources to identify, define, cleanse, and validate all of its data. On the other hand, building yet another data mart to address a specific problem

worsens the data situation. Propose a solution that will enable IFG to leverage a key

business problem/opportunity using their BI tools that does not aggravate their

existing data predicament.