Richard J. Bocchinfuso

Part 1: Thinking about the organization that you are working for currently, which enterprise application do you think your organization will benefit from the most: ERP, SCM, CRM, or a combination? Why and how? Explain your answer.

I work for a mid-sized technology integrator, currently ~ 750 million a year in revenue and growing.  We use ERP, SCM and CRM applications within our enterprise today.  Some of these systems are tightly integrated, some of these systems leverage EDI to move data between our systems, our suppliers and our vendors.  We also have many other operational systems which we use such as ITSM (IT Service Management) for incident and CMDB, ITOM (IT Operations Management) and ITBM (IT Business Management) applications.

• For inventory and order management and finance and accounting activity we currently use NetSuite (http://www.netsuite.com).
• For CRM (Customer Relationship Managment) and SFA (Sales Force Automation), we currently use Saleforce.com  (SFDC) (https://www.salesforce.com/).
  • We also use SFDC for certain aspects of PSA (Professional Services Automation) including things like tracking project milestones against opportunities, tasks like time tracking and accounting are done in SFDC.
• For SCM (Supply Chain Management) we have developed a homegrown platform which leverages data from NetSuite, Salesforce, and ServiceNow (ITSM, ITOM, ITBM).  The core of the platform is built on ServiceNow because it allows us to easily facilitate EDI between our organization, our customers, and our suppliers many of whom also use ServiceNow for ITSM (IT Service Management), ITOM (IT Operations Management) and ITBM (IT Business Management).
• For HRM (Human Resource Management) we leverage the ADP platform  (https://www.adp.com/solutions/services/human-capital-management.aspx) and iCIMS

We also heavily leverage cloud-based applications like Smartsheets, Tableau and others tools for data analysis (BI) and visualizations.

In addition to these systems, we bi-directionally integrate with many other systems such as Pardot (http://www.pardot.com/) for B2B marketing automation, Xactly for Sales Commissions and Compensation Tracking (https://www.xactlycorp.com)  ChatOps, discrete ITOM platforms, CI/CD tools, etc… all via API integration.

Almost all of these systems facilitate and automate core business operations like lead-to-cash, order-to-fulfillment, and procure-to-pay processes.

There is an active initiative working to consolidate ERP applications (Finance and Accounting, CRM, SFA, and SCM onto a single platform, Infor (http://www.infor.com/).  The cost of this project is significant as is the timeframe.  The endstate will leave us with a consolidated ERP platform which will hopefully ease the amount of integration and EDI we need to do between internal systems.  At the end of the rainbow we hope to be left with two key platforms we will use to operate our business, these systems will be Infor for ERP and Service Now for ITSM, ITOM, and ITBM.

I am an engineer, with a heavy focus on incident, change, problem and knowledge management so the ServiceNow platform adds the most value for me.  I also rely heavily on pipeline and backlog reporting, and this data is all housed in SFDC with bi-direction EDI with NetSuite.  Pipeline and backlog management and reporting are critical for me to run my business.

Part 2: If a company wants to implement an enterprise application, it had better do its homework. Discuss the implications of this statement.

“Enterprise applications are difficult to implement.  They require extensive organizational change, large new software investments, and careful assessment of how these systems will enhance organizational performance” ((Laudon & Laudon 2015 p 373)

Architecting and deploying an enterprise application is a costly and lengthy process, and the deployment is just the beginning.  Once an enterprise application is deployed adoption and assimilation need to be facilitated, this means getting people to use the system, the biggest challenge of any enterprise application deployment.  When deploying an enterprise applicaiton it’s inevitable that you will encounter a crossroads, regardless of how much due diligence you do before choosing a platform.  Do you customize the platform to match the process or do you change the process to meet the platform?  Everyone has a different perspective on this question, and there are pros and cons to either approach, the reality for most is the process is the process will change to meet the platform and the platform will be customized to meet the process.

References

Doig, C. (2015, November 19). Calculating the total cost of ownership for enterprise software. Retrieved February 15, 2017, from http://www.cio.com/article/3005705/software/calculating-the-total-cost-of-ownership-for-enterprise-software.html

Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2016). Management information systems: managing the digital firm. Boston: Pearson.

Schiff, J. L. (2014, July 30). 9 Tips for Selecting and Implementing an ERP System. Retrieved February 15, 2017, from http://www.cio.com/article/2458889/enterprise-resource-planning/9-tips-for-selecting-and-implementing-an-erp-system.html
Other options which I did not respond to:

Case 1: What do you think Hilton leadership should do after the Blackstone acquisition? Should they further invest in CRM or simply maintain the status quo? What aspects of Hilton’s CRM should be strengthened, if any, and how?
Case 2: If you were asked to become the successor of the current managing director, what would you try to do in order to extend current levels of ERP systems use?

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The WestJet case study clearly states that WestJet executives possessed no understanding of the level of competence of the organizational structure of the IT organization (Munro and Khan, 2013, p. 5).  Cheryl Smith was hired as the CIO (Chief Information Officer) figure out what WestJet possessed in terms of people, process and technology.  Prior to Smith’s arrival at WestJet and engagement with IBM had been underway, the result of that engagement was for WestJet to establish a PMO (Project Management Office), Smith requested that any recommendations resulting from the IBM study be placed on hold until she had a chance to assess the organization.  Smith determined that she need to benchmark the WestJet organization against comparably sized organizations in the transportation industry to understand if cost structures and skills sets relative to industry standards.

Smith’s benchmark assessment found WestJet’s cost structure to be inline with industry standards from both a headcount and cost structure perspective.  WestJet’s IT team was comprised of talented people but many of these people only understood “the WestJet IT way” (Munro and Khan, 2013, p. 5) which may this could bring a small minded approach to solving complex problems, additionally there was an imbalance of skills when compared to industry standards.  WestJet’s IT organization was organized as a shared services model where IT functions were consolidated into a monolithic IT organization organized by operational function, planning, building, operating, maintaining and governing.  Only about 50% of WestJet’s systems for operations and procedures were “industry-standard”, there was a high sense of pride by WestJetters in having created these systems and procedures from scratch and some protectionism and potential resistance to change because of this strong sense of pride.  This would likely be a cultural and organizational challenge as Smith worked to transform the IT organization.  The assessment identified that the current IT organizational structure provided no direct connection to the business units they were serving, this created a situation where business units were constantly competing for IT resources while where IT had little to no accountability to the business unit and little to no visibility to their impact on the business.

It was clear that the WestJet was using the Federal decision making archetype (Weill and Ross, 2004, p. 4) where business unit VPs would meet monthly with the VP of IT to negotiate (and likely renegotiate) priorities and resourcing.  Smith quickly moved to change this process to an annual process where business unit leaders and IT leadership would meet to discuss capital projects and make decisions and commitments for the the year.  Smith did not remove the Federal system but increased the importance for BUs to determine was important to them for the coming year rather than providing the opportunity renegotiate direction each month, in return IT would commit resources to competing the projects.

Smith also looked at facilities, staffing and process to determine any potential risks and how to address.  It was determined that WestJet’s data center was at risk given its current location and that WestJet needed to make disaster recovery / business continuance a priority.

WestJet clearly valued the role of IT and many of the industry leading programs that IT pioneered, such as electronic ticketing.  IT principles, architecture and infrastructure had allowed WestJet to grow from a small regional carrier to a major codeshare airlines serving 85 destinations in 18 countries.  As other competitive organizations matured WestJet needed to fuel the next cycle of innovation and Smith felt that this required focus on business application needs, strategic IT investment, project and resource prioritization.  Smith was focused on transforming the IT organization to bring IT closer to the business.  Smith’s plan would create BU-CIO role for each BU and realign existing IT resources with business units.  The BU-CIOs would be an IT leader who also possessed intimate knowledge and experience relevant to the BU.  Smith would also focus on tackling facilities, personnel and process issues such as WestJet’s data center facilities, disaster recovery and 24×7 IT operations.

The changes that Smith planned to institute represented a significant cultural shift for the IT organization and Smith recognized that communication would be a key aspect to a successful transformation.  Smith felt that the IT organization would need to move from a reactive “hero” culture (Munro and Khan, 2013, p. 9) to a proactive culture where heroes were no longer required.  Smith wanted to transform WestJet’s culture of individualism into an organization fueled by technical excellence, accountability and transparency from the BU to the IT organization.

I believe that Smith had considered key factors for IT decision making (Weill and Ross, 2004, p. 4):

• IT Principles
• IT Architecture
• IT Infrastructure
• Business Application Needs
• IT Investment and Prioritization

I also believe that Smith did a good job aligning her vision of the organization structure with WestJet’s strategic objectives.

• Strategic Driver
  • Straddling the line between Asset Utilization and Growth
  • Smith planned to align half of the IT resources (120 of 240) with the Business Units to fuel growth while the other half of the IT resources will continue to be assets focused on shared infrastructure services.

• Key Metrics

• This area of IT governance was where I saw a gap in the case study.  While the transformation challenges seemed to be well understood and there was implied reasoning for the need to transform the IT organization there were no clear metrics on how success would be measured.

• Key IT Governance Mechanisms

• Smith’s hybrid approach to IT governance balances profit, asset utilization, and growth.

• IT Infrastructure

• Felt that Smith was straddling the line to manage both asset utilization and growth.

• Key IT Principles

• Felt that it was clear that the IT organization was being transformed to fuel growth.

• Governance

• Smith was positioning what appeared to be a Blended organization, with a slant towards growth.  Smith reduced the opportunity for federal style decision making to once per year and introduced the duopoly by adding BU-CIOs and allowing tactical decisions to be made but the BU-CIO and BU executives.

Smith outlined a solid plan for implementing a hybrid approach to IT governance, with a clear understanding of the challenges as well as the reasons for why a change was required.  It was was easy to understand where Smith wanted to take the organization and why.  The area that I think required some additional thought was how this transformation would impact to the business, how would the IT organization be measured post transformation.  How would Smith empirically demonstrate success to C-Level executives?

With regards to the “lost sense of identity and the diminished opportunity to regularly commune with people of similar technical interests” I believe this is an organization behavior hurdle, people don’t like change, change threatens stability and I believe that Smith and her newly appointed BU-CIOs will need to over communicate and show some quick wins to settle the human spirit.  Smith and other IT leadership will need to be aggressive in how they address members of the team who cannot make the transition.  Even though a significant portion of IT assets are being realigned with business units it’s very important that Smith and the newly appointed BU-CIOs communicate that the IT organization is a unified organization and that the goal is to align IT initiatives with business initiatives, to improve focus and transparency but the IT organization is still a team.

References

Munro, M. C., & Khan, S. (2013). WestJet Airlines: Information Technology Governance and Corporate Strategy. London, Ontario: Ivey Publishing.

Weill, Peter and Ross, Jeanne W. (November 2004). IT Governance on One Page. MIT Sloan Working Paper No. 4517-04; CIS Research Working Paper No. 349.

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Response 1:

John Doe1, I enjoyed your post, and after reading, I felt like I had a good macro level understanding of the Business Value Chain for the State of Arizona, Department of Veteran Services.  It’s great that you can find purpose in what you are doing.  I found myself wanting to know more detail regarding primary activities, such as how are inbound logistics performed, how sales and marketing activities are managed, etc… In general, I think I would have enjoyed a little more detail on the role of information technology within your organization.  Based on your closing statement and the use of platforms such as GoToMeeting and EMR (Electronic Medical Records) there may have been some additional detail that could have been added to these or some other information technology within the organization that would have provided some deeper insight.

It’s hard to imagine what life was like before web conferencing systems like GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc…  These technologies have changed the world.  I am curious is GoToMeeting used primarily for internal meetings or is the platform being used for outreach?

Response 2:

John Doe2, thanks for sharing, I like the idea of graphically mapping the value chain (I did the same thing, not loving that I cannot easily embed images in discussion board posts, trying to figure out a good workaround).  I have lived and worked in New York City for the past twenty years, many of these years have been focused on the design and implementation of large-scale, high-performance storage subsystems.  As you can imagine many of my customers are financial organizations and what a transformation I have witnessed from 1996 to 2016.  In 1996 I was designing and installing high-speed storage devices that sat at the desk of a trader behind a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 20s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_20), trading decisions were being analyzed and executed by human beings with the assistance of computer models based on historical and current market conditions.  Today many of these firms have consolidated into larger investment banks and commercial banks.  Then came the surge of Hedge Funds and today the market has shifted to quantitative analytics, Quant Funds (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quantfund.asp) and high-frequency trading (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/high-frequency-trading.asp) where a firm’s reputation seems less dependent on the broker or representative and more dependent on the physicist or computer scientist who developed the trading algorithm.  This was made pretty evident by the crash of 2008 where the math and physics made mortgage-backed security, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations seem like a good idea. 🙂

I feel that your graphical representation of the value chain along with your post gave me a good understanding of how you view the value chain within this organization.  I would have loved some more depth regarding which information systems are being used and how they map into the value chain.  For example, what is used for research (e.g. – Bloomberg?), a little more detail behind the “development of innovative delivery of industry data”, is raw data pulled from a platform, is there an ETL (extract, transform, load) process, how is this data aggregated and presented.

Today the days of the high-speed storage subsystems sitting at a trader or analysts desk are gone and have been replaced by massive Hadoop clusters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop) which are storing and mining an unprecedented amount of data; we call this Big Data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data).  The idea that there are tangential data sets which have statistical relevance when performing predictive analysis and the idea that we can aggregate these massive, loosely coupled, unstructured data sets and perform predictive analysis is changing the world.
Response 3:

Jane Doe, interesting post.  I had never heard of eLEAD CRM, so I was curious to do some research.  Given my background, the ideal place to start was with the Gartner CRM Magic Quadrant (https://goo.gl/images/gqztq9) which is my defacto starting reference point for the discovery market leading information technologies like CRM, ERP, MRP, etc…  Because I didn’t see eLEAD CRM on the Magic Quadrant I did some further digging and hit their website (http://www.elead-crm.com/), makes sense given their niche focus that they would not hit the radar on a broader CRM Gartner Magic Quadrant.  Further research showed that they apparently are well regarded as a CRM servicing the Automotive industry (https://www.drivingsales.com/vendor-ratings/category/crm-sales).

It’s a bit difficult to research eLead’s corporate profile because they are a private company and published data is always a little suspect (http://www.zoominfo.com/c/eLEAD-CRM/46340016), but it looks like eLEAD is a ~ 150 million / year in revenue and ~ 750 employees.  I’d be curious to know how the company had grown and at what rate over N years and how you think specific ITP, IMP and IBV investments have contributed to this growth.  I am always interested in how information systems investments and becoming an information oriented organization translates into growth from both a top line revenue (market growth) and EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization – http://www.investinganswers.com/financial-dictionary/financial-statement-analysis/earnings-interest-tax-depreciation-and-amortizatio) perspective.

Response 4:

John Doe3, I have to admit I was a bit surprised by your average rating of Boeing (assuming this is somewhere in the 50-60% range).  I would think given the data nature of the aerospace industry and the applicability of IoT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things) to organizations like Boeing, GE and others for the deployment of sensors and capture of telemetry data that these organizations would be leading the pack as information oriented organizations.  How important is the rate of technology adoption relevant when assessing an organization’s information orientation?  I would expect that Facebook would adopt new technologies and paradigms faster than the likes of a Boeing because people lives are not at risk when Facebook is down (I do recognize that to many FB users do think that the inability to like a meme on their FB page represents a dreadful situation).  Based on everyone’s perspective of the IO of our respective organizations I wonder if our field of view is finite and thus the perspective we have on our respective organizations IO is potentially skewed?

I believe the push toward COTS (commercial off-the-shelf – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_off-the-shelf) hardware is a movement impacting every IT organization.  The speed of general purpose hardware (e.g. Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc… chips) had moved more intelligence into the software stack and has increased agility and has replaced ASIC (application-specific integrated circuits – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit) for many applications.  I think this shift has positively impacted the agility of many organizations and the rate at which they can transform their business.  With this said I would expect certain industries to be slowed dramatically by regulations, the tech sector is largely unregulated which allows the market to move very fast, while sectors like aerospace, healthcare and energy are slower to move because they are highly regulated and tethered by legacy and the risk of innovating too quickly.  Personally, I am not sure I want Boeing or Medtronic iterating too fast. 🙂

You mention that senior management is focused on delivering IT-as-a-Service and that restructuring your entire department created the biggest challenge.  My question is, has the service model increased agility?  Is there a self-services aspect of the service model that enables innovation by moving control closer to the innovator and then metrics cost and yield of consumed resources?

As I read your post I couldn’t help but think about a project I worked on with GE and Pivotal (http://pivotal.io/) where GE made a strategic investment and to enable their service model, service catalog and self-service started refactoring their applications with Cloud Foundry (https://www.cloudfoundry.org/).  Would be interesting to hear some of the details underlying how Boeing is transforming their IT organization.

Overall sounds like Boeing is doing some great stuff, keep innovating but keep me safe at 30,000 feet.

References

Harpham, B. (2016, May 24). How the Internet of Things improves air travel. Retrieved January 22, 2017, from http://www.cio.com/article/3074125/internet-of-things/how-the-internet-of-things-improves-air-travel.html

Pivotal Announces Planned Strategic Investment from GE | Press Release. (n.d.). Retrieved January 22, 2017, from http://pivotal.io/corporate/press-release/pivotal-announces-planned-strategic-investment-from-ge

How airlines are tapping into the Internet of Things. (2016, April 02). Retrieved January 22, 2017, from https://www.ge.com/digital/press-releases/how-airlines-are-tapping-internet-things

GE’s Big Bet on Data and Analytics. (n.d.). Retrieved January 22, 2017, from https://sloanreview.mit.edu/case-study/ge-big-bet-on-data-and-analytics/

(2015, March 04). Why big data matters to Boeing, and what it means for your next flight. Retrieved January 22, 2017, from http://www.geekwire.com/2015/why-big-data-matters-to-boeing-and-what-it-may-mean-for-your-next-flight/

Etherington, D. (n.d.). Microsoft and Boeing team up to streamline aviation through big data and AI. Retrieved January 22, 2017, from https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/18/microsoft-boeing-azure/

Read the Marchand, et al. (2000) article (link provided in this week’s outline). Then rank the information orientation of a company or an organization of your choice as low (0-40%), medium (40-70%), or high (above 70%). Based on the guideline provided by the authors, what advice would you give to the senior executives on improving their information orientation?

I would classify my organization (FusionStorm) as having and IO of 70%

80% – Information Technology Practices (ITP) – FusionStorm does a reasonably good job of managing information technology applications.  The company is a fast growing 750 million dollar system integrator with approximately 500 employees.  FusionStorm is an entrepreneurial organization with roughly 50% of the workforce being engineers and 25% of the labor force in field sales there is quite a bit of innovation which happens outside the confines of the traditional corporate IT organization.  FusionStorm’s IT, legal teams and executive teams do a good job to enable and adopt outside innovation while protecting the corporation.  Cloud computing and the availability of resources has certainly had an impact on the pace of innovation, FusionStorm is no different and I think huge benefits are being realized but new paradigms are also challenging traditional Information Management Practices.  A few years ago every organization was trying to determine how to cope with Shadow IT (http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/shadow/).  Today Shadow IT is just another name for cloud computing and organizations are more focused on shifting Information Technology Practices to adapt to Shadow IT and foster innovation rather than to shut down shadow IT and choke innovation.  We leverage various SaaS solutions to gather information on customer and markets but I do not think we do a good enough of looking at market data and altering our trajectory based on market conditions.  Our analytics tend to favor historical data as a predictor of the future rather than market data and inference.

60% – Information Management Practices (IMP) – FusionStorm does an OK job of capturing this information.  We are excellent at gathering data within a closed system.  We do not do a good job of enforcing the human aspects of data collection and this is most apparent is areas of the business such as sales and marketing.  Gathering things like sales pipelines require human interaction and while our sales teams enter opportunities and develop pipelines we do little in the way of measuring the accuracy of the pipeline outside of total forecasted dollars vs. closed business.  Our lack of concern for understanding where the business is coming from has always troubled me. Achieving revenue goals does not help determine how you might have to pivot the workforce or strategic engineering objectives, an inability to forecast accurately (from all aspects) creates significant risk for the organization.  

70% – Information Behaviors and Values (IBV)  – Most of our systems are architected in such a way that data can’t be directly tampered with or skewed.  We have a high level of transparency regarding all corporate metrics and we encourage employees to engage by questioning information and challenging strategy.  With this said access to information allows information to be exported, massaged and represented from a perspective which may only expose the data required to drive to the desired outcome.  It is not always easy to cross reference this data which sometimes leads to decisions which are based on a micro perspective or personal strategy rather than on a macro perspective which aligns with the corporate strategy.

Recommendations

As an organization, we need to enhance our capabilities around capturing and leveraging market data to predict market trends and opportunities better.  While we do a good job or mining our historical data and making organizational adjustments based on predictive historical analysis we need recognize that there is a paradigm shift happening.  The industry is moving at an unprecedented pace and we need to enter and exit markets faster than ever before, market data and inference in addition to our historical data adds tremendous value.

We need to relook at our process and adjust them to ensure we are capturing better data originated by humans.  While we don’t want to slow the process down, we need to have a process which validates information from all perspectives.

Restraint is critical when making decisions based on data represented outside of well known controlled and trusted constructs.  Corporate Information Systems are architected with controls that ensure the integrity of the data.  Because of our culture and the transparency it values, we allow this data to be exported from corporate information systems and massaged, this allows for corruption of the integrity of output.  Often this technique is used to focus on an aspect of data that drives a decision or outcome that may not align with the corporate strategic objectives.

References

Marchand, D. A., Kettinger, W. J., & Rollins, J. D. (2000). Information Orientation: People, Technology and the Bottom Line. Sloan Management Review, 41(4), 69. Retrieved from https://portal.lib.fit.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com.portal.lib.fit.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=melb26933&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA64190756&sid=summon&asid=f92ff4366659963004ef3d52d0f86fd5