This is the tragic tale of how Stale Corporation tried so hard, but failed so spectacularly, when trying to innovate with IT.
The CEO of Stale Corporation knew that Stale needed to innovate with IT to remain competitive. The CEO was not impressed with Stale’s IT department as it did not seem to innovate nor generate significant business value. The CEO decided to take matters into his own hands. On his flight back home to Los Angeles, he read an article in the airline’s in-flight magazine about “panacea computing”, the newest trend in the IT industry. Shortly thereafter, he directed his CIO to assess how panacea computing could help Stale lower its IT costs and also become more competitive.
Stale’s CIO was already aware of the emerging panacea computing paradigm and had been discussing it with his management team. However now that the CEO has raised it with him, and Stale’s competitors were reportedly progressing panacea initiatives, he knew he had to act fast. Fortunately there were several large IT vendors that were very glad to come to his rescue.
The large IT vendors all had vast, and expensive, product offerings that claimed to provide all of the promised benefits of Panacea computing. The CIO and his management team spent significant time reviewing all of the marketing material provided by the different vendors. They also attended numerous vendor presentations given by a cadre of various account managers, salesman, and pre-sales engineers – all of which were intended to assure Stale’s CIO that their product was well supported, “best in class”, “secure”, “extensible”, “open”, and possessed many other wonderful qualities. The material and presentations provided by the vendors were short on specifics but full of promises to “unleash the power” of panacea computing and bestow upon Stale numerous business benefits.
After performing a costly exercise of evaluating the vendors offerings, the CIO decided to recommend “Panacea Platform Professional Plus” (PPPP) from GrandeIT Corporation. This was mainly because PPPP was less expensive than the other offerings due to significant licensing discounts offered by GrandeIT. So at the recommendation of the CIO, Stale’s CEO directed the CFO to commit millions of dollars for a full PPPP deployment. The funds would be used for product licensing, maintenance, and consulting fees for PPPP specialists to help install and configure the product. The funds would also be used pay for the services of a GrandeIT-certified system integrator (SI), who had performed PPPP deployments at other large enterprises. The SI would help deploy PPPP into Stale’s IT infrastructure and modify business processes accordingly.
At that point, everything seemed grand at Stale Corp. The CEO was pleased that Stale would soon obtain all of the promised business benefits of panacea computing, and hence would become more productive and competitive. Stale’s stock price would certainly rise. The CIO was pleased that he had acted decisively in response to the CEO’s request, plus he could now report to everyone that his organization was progressing an innovative panacea computing initiative. With the backing of a large international software vendor, expert consultants, and an experienced system integrator, all systems were “go” and Stale was poised for success.
Unfortunately, things did not go as planned…
Read part two for the rest of the story.
