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When Joshua Dees became the head of IT at Black Diamond Equipment Ltd., a storied maker of rock and ice climbing gear, he spent much of his first year figuring out how to take the company to the next level. Although Dees was a rock climber himself, he had spent five years at The Boeing Co. learning how a major multinational enterprise handled technology. Dees wanted to bring some of that methodology to a company that had been famous in its early days for shutting down when its founder went off on climbing and surfing trips in the 1950s and '60s.
When Dees arrived in 2004, on some levels the company appeared not to have changed much. Even today, the CEO often shows up to work in shorts and flip-flops. The vice president of sales sports tank tops and is known to spread out on the floor to do stretching exercises at company meetings. Yet as laid-back as Black Diamond (BD) appears, the company is now a $65 million business, with operations in Europe and Asia. Growth has been in the double digits for a decade and shows no signs of letting up.
Dees was brought in make technology more central to the business so the company could continue to grow. Despite its reputation for creating cutting-edge gear, Black Diamond had not invested much in IT, and Dees had inherited a poorly integrated mishmash of systems. In the next few years, he would quadruple the IT staff, triple the IT budget and lay out an IT strategy that would replace much of the software infrastructure and move the company to a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
But first he had to explain all this to his colleagues.
"I spent months trying to write out what I wanted to accomplish in English," he says. "What I needed to [do] was to draw a picture."
Dees unfolds a business card-sized chart labeled "MIS Vision." It diagrams the company's transactional systems, such as the new product lifecycle management (PLM) solution, which feeds into a data warehouse and then enables analytical systems, such as an executive dashboard.
"As a joke, we had these printed up wallet-sized, but they've become useful," he says. "This is the diagram for governance. I wasn't big on the buzzword SOA, but when I drew up this doc, that's what it is."
And the response?
"It got a lot of laughs," Dees says. "It was not that well received. It took a while to educate people about what that document meant for them. We're not trying to put a suit and tie on BD; we're trying to streamline what BD does."
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