Providian Trust Case Analysis

Providian Trust Case Analysis

1. What key issues and challenges led to the initiation of the Access+ project?

In my opinion the key issues and challenges to the initiation of the Access+ project are as follow：

1. As the case illustrates, Stephen Walsh is the new CEO of the Providian Trust Company. He was a lawyer, and he was to be trained and got some skills of how to deal with conflict and make a judgment. It means, maybe the new CEO is good and professional in managing the company, but not known as well with the reengineering of the new Information System.

2. The case also shows us, there has been an extremely different idea between Peter Storey, who is the internal auditor of the company, and the leader of a major information technology project. Therefor I think they cannot reach an agreement in reengineering the Information System.

3. The company has the “front office” and “back office”. As LeBlanc says, “The trust officers blamed the operations people and the operations people blamed the trust officers. It had been running this way forever”(Case study page 3 para.3). I think this is shifting responsibility, and this kind of working environment is not good for a company.

2. What organizational changes that the company should have been made (but failed to do) before and during the project to ensure the success of the Access+ project?

In my opinion the organizational changes should be as follow:

1. Now the company has two IT departments, 204 IT personnel are supported retail banking, but only 30 IT personnel are in the Operations Department. I think they should add more IT personnel in the Operations Department if it used the new Information System. Because the new IS will produce a huge number of data flowing into the database and they will need a lot of staffs to work on it.

2. Give the staffs of the “front office” and the “back office” the computer lessons, aim at teaching them how to process data through...