As any CIO will tell you, the buck doesn't always stop at all, let alone with the CEO. More often than not, upper C-level decisions are made and then passed down to IT for implementation. TechRepublic contacted about a half dozen CIOs and CTOs and asked them about their most difficult business decisions. We found that those decisions can be boiled down into two categories, as the stories below demonstrate: decisions that lead to a major shift in the way the company performs its everyday tasks, and decisions that entail the creation of systems and applications that never existed before.
Not doing it the way it's always been done....
Some of the toughest decisions a CIO will make aren't tough because they require a lot of thought. They're tough because they come out of nowhere.
Bill Glassen, director of IT at Cashman Equipment, recalled such a decision back in the late 1990s. He had to decide, quickly, how to get day-to-day information and reports to management-level employees in a way that would allow them to continue to do their jobs, but by using a system that was new. He had to do what had not been done before -- very scary ground in conservative corporate settings.
Glassen recalled that it amounted to an immense change in corporate communications, "almost a cultural change for our company."
The company had, historically, accumulated and distributed data through the old general ledger and the AS/400 system. While the AS/400 backbone would remain, the company had decided to move away from the old general ledger system. Glassen was directed to deploy this decision.
Glassen said he had no way of knowing he was about to make the most difficult decision of his career. He was, after all, not changing the way information was accumulated, only how it would be deployed. What he and his colleagues did not understand, at first, was they just couldn't do what they'd always done.
Initially they tried "the path of least resistance" by building on the existing system during the deployment. "That was a major mistake," Glassen said. "We assumed we could use the same reports and indicators that we did before.... What ended up happening was no one could communicate. Everyone was looking for information on the new system, but they were looking for it the old way."
After reviewing the resources they had and how best to get information into the hands of the employees who needed it, Glassen decided to set up a company intranet.
To implement this decision, Glassen and his associates met with management-level employees and immediately encountered the path of maximum resistance. "Everyone wanted their information at 6am everyday in the same format they always had their information," he said. "I was the one who had to tell everyone they weren't going to get what they got in the past. What they had before wasn't going to work now."
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