Midsouth Chamber of Commerce

CASE STUDY: Mid-South Chamber of Commerce

Abstract:

The Mid-south Chamber of Commerce started sometime in early 1900’s and began inception of Information systems in 1989 as they knew leveraging this could give added advantage to their business. From this period till 2010, MSCC went through significant changes in their Information systems and Management too. MSCC management tried lots of information systems (hardware and software both) and finally in a long tenure of 20 years ended up with the situation of Chaos and Frustration. Final result is no good information system fulfilling organization’s requirement.

Background:

Ed Wilson Vice President of Public Affairs was the first person who introduced some workstations and software to MSCC staff. Initially MSCC had business consultant Jon Philips and with the help of a programmer wrote custom programs for each functional area.

As the time passed later in 2005, Lassiter realized that their current information system is not integrated at all, later on after attending national association meeting he decided to introduce UNITRAK system to MSCC. There were mixed feelings whether to bring in this system or not, on one hand Wilson supported it and on the other side Kovecki was not 100% convinced to bring in UNITRAK because he has his point of view to not provide so much data access to staff. Finally Lassiter convinced MSCC board of members and purchased UNITRAK with IBM server, but implementation took more than anticipated time and lots of extra dollars. UNITRAK went live in Aug 2006, but there were serious data migration problem and systems were inoperable for a while due to which staff was very much concerned and had to perform lots of stuff manually. UNITRAK was bit stable by end of year.

In Feb 2008 another problem came into existence, due to UNITRAK financial problems they filed bankruptcy and this resulted dismissal of their support staff from MSCC. In Sep 2008 Kovecki also resigned from the company as he was not...