Strategic Information Technology: Case Study 2

BUILDING SHARED Services at RR Communications

Vince patton had been waiting years for this day. He pulled the papers together in front of him and scanned the small conference room. “You are fired”, he said to the four divisional CIOs sitting at the table.

They looked nervously at him, grinning weakly. Vince wasn’t known to make practical jokes, but this had been a pretty good meeting, at least relative to some they’d had over the past five years.

“You’re kidding”, said Matt Dawes, One of the more outspoken members of the divisional CIO team. “No

“Nope”, said Vince. “I’ve got the boss’s OK on this. We don’t need any of you anymore. I’m creating outside.” With that, he picked up his papers and headed to the door, leaving the four of them in shock.

“That felt good”, he admitted as he strode back to his office. A big man, not known to tolerate fools gladly (or corporate politics), he was not a cruel one. But those guys had been thorns in his side ever since he had taken the new executive VP of IT job at the faltering RR Communications five years ago. The company’s stock had been in the dumpster, and with the dramatically increased competition in the telecommunications industry as a result of deregulation, his friends and family had all thought he was nuts. But Ross Roman, RR’s eccentric but brilliant founder, had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “We need you to transform IT so that we can introduce new products more quickly”, he’d said. “You’ll have my full backing for whatever you want to do”.

Typically for an entrepreneur, Roman had sketched the vision swiftly, leaving someone else to actually implement it. “We’ve got to have a more flexible and responsive IT organization.

Every time I want to do something, they tell me “the systems won’t allow it”. “I’m tired of having customers complaining about getting multiple bills for each of our products. It’s not acceptable that RR can’t create one simple little bill for each customer.”

Roman punctuated his remarks...