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In Rescue Mode
Some of our winning executives were hired as turnaround experts who had to make tough decisions to align IT and business operations.
When Dan Grosz arrived at V.I.P. Inc., the six-person IT staff was essentially an unhappy help desk that had an "adversarial relationship" with the rest of the retail auto parts business. It was his job as VP of IS to re-fashion the technology staff into one with a customer service attitude.
Some staff could be retrained; some had to be replaced. A self-described "overcommunicator," Grosz set up an IT steering committee and invited managers from all of V.I.P.'s departments -- warehouse, store operations, finance and so on -- to join the discussion about the company's new IT roadmap.
"Now we have this amazing enterprise re-engineering effort under way," Grosz says. Over the past year, the company has launched several initiatives, including a wireless network in V.I.P.'s warehouse, a warehouse management system (running on Microsoft SQL Server 2005) and a new IT purchasing process that reduced average unit costs by 50%.
These days, Grosz and the IT department enjoy the support of many of V.I.P.'s business sponsors. "If you communicate with people clearly and consistently and make good arguments, they'll be on your side every time," Grosz says.
Not every failing project can be turned around, however, as CIO Erin Griffin of Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles discovered. Griffin joined the $240-million educational institution in late 2004, several months before the long-planned rollout of Maingate, a university-wide portal, to 9,400 users. From the beginning, the portal's lack of open or standard application programming interfaces made it difficult to integrate with other software, particularly the popular Blackboard Academic Suite, a Web-based course management system. "Every upgrade in either the portal or the programs integrated with it causes the integration to fail and requires re-programming," the CIO says.
Two LMU business professors actually use the Maingate project in their class as an example of "a terrible technology implementation," Griffin says with a sigh. "It's one of the risks in higher education: You are an incubator." But the decision to kill a project is a tough one, she says. "It's a very dollars-and-cents decision. You have to be willing to say, '(a) We've make a mistake, and (b) fixing it is going to cost us money.'" LMU will replace the portal with an Oracle product in a pilot project later this summer.
But Griffin doesn't just focus on what's broken. She secured $1 million in technology grants for LMU, and last year she launched a project portfolio management process that married so well with university budgeting practices that other departments are lining up to adopt it. She also partnered with the CIO at Bowdoin College in Maine to set up a creative bi-coastal disaster recovery solution.
"Emergency communication was the key business tool we wanted to have available in phase one of this project," says Griffin (who was interviewed for this story several weeks before the Virginia Tech campus shootings drew attention to the shortcomings of campus communication networks). "Now we've got the emergency Web sites and email/voice communications -- the ability to mass-dial parents and students alike -- set up so you could drop off from one [university] site to the other."
Next up on her agenda is taking a closer look at energy consumption in LMU's data centers. "Here in Southern California, that's a critical issue for us," she notes. "We're moving to blades and virtual servers versus the more traditional environment, which can create a huge energy savings: around 40% in relative costs."
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