Our intrepid columnist braves some very chill winds to send this
report from his latest posting. Another mince pie, anyone?
Being away from home is the biggest pain of being an interim
manager. Quite simply, you have to go where the work is. But I
never thought I'd end up in Lapland.
Sure, I have worked in some colourful places, like Gateshead and
Norwich, but this job really takes the biscuit. It started
innocently enough with a brief conversation about a very
interesting "e-business roll-out". The next thing I know I am on
the back of a dog-sled, heading for the North Pole. The things we
do to earn a crust.
I suppose I should have realised even Father Christmas couldn't run
his business without some serious infrastructure and technology,
but it's not the sort of job that you find everyday on the Internet
is it?
So here I am, in one of the strangest datacentres I have ever seen,
and that's saying something. Most of the IT functions are
outsourced to an American company, Elves Dwarves Solutions, so it's
been the usual battle for the first few weeks, to understand which
jobs are covered by the standard service level agreements and which
are genuinely classified as "extras". All of this is water off a
duck's back for me, though, as I am used to unpicking outsource
contracts that look like a bad rehash of
War and
Peace.
This is obviously a well established "bricks and mortar" business,
albeit most of the buildings are actually igloos, and like many
other mature concerns we are struggling to come to terms with the
profound mysteries of e-commerce.
I blame Bill
 | | "It doesn't help if your customer
is still expecting the full mince-pie and sherry treatment, when we
deliver the 'no-frills' dump-it-and-go service." | | | | | |
| | Colin Beveridge | | |
|
|
Gates. Why not? He seems to get blamed for everything else at the
moment. Last December, my new boss, Mr Claus, found he had a whole
sack-load of stuff in the warehouse, left over after the last
delivery run. Most of this was genuine rubbish that nobody would
ever want in the first place, such as zillions of monogrammed
handkerchiefs and "free internet trial" CDs from well-meaning
Aunts. But there was also an unwrapped book, with no gift tag. The
only clue was the hand-written dedication inside the book "To
Larry, this is how to do it - ever yours, Bill."
Still, if it wasn't for that stray copy of
Business@the speed of
thought, I wouldn't be sitting here now, trying to sort out the
mess. If only the computer industry had as many pragmatists as
visionaries. If only.
Well, it seems that Santa took an immediate shine to Bill's book
and decided to embrace the Internet revolution for all it is
worth.
The first problem he encountered was finding an available domain
name - the squatters had already registered most of the intuitively
obvious variants, so this was harder than it should have been.
Nevertheless, traffic has been steadily building for our site at
www.theoriginalfatherchristmas-acceptnosubstitutes.com
and we confidently expect to be handling most of our "Dear Father
Christmas" mail online by 2005.
Everyone here is very, very excited by this new channel and we just
know that our one-stop Christmas gift portal will be a sure-fire
winner. Especially as almost all of our staff are working for
peanuts because they all have stock options, prior to our planned
IPO next year. The venture capitalists are all over this one like a
rash. Forget Boo.com, this one will be really humungous.
Sure we have had some teething problems, you would expect it with
any major implementation. Apparently our ERP system wasn't designed
for 500 million transactions in a single night. That's the trouble
when you go 24/7, no maintenance window you see - in the old days,
with the manual system, we could always catch up with the paperwork
in January and February. These days it just has to be done in real
time.
The last agm was a bit dicey because some of our institutional
shareholders have got wind of our e-business problems. It's amazing
how many IT projects get clearer focus when the share price starts
to be affected. That's where I came in - to make sure that
everything is "business as usual" on Christmas Eve. Thanks
Santa.
Fair enough, we interim managers do sell ourselves on our
trouble-shooting skills so it's time to stop whingeing and to get
on with the job - assess the situation and prioritise the
"must-do-nows".
Easier said than done when you are trying to decide the relative
importance of the GPS Reindeer Guidance System and the Order Entry
Chimney Interface.
Now I'm a reasonable man, but I'd really like to get my hands on
the salesman who sold the CRM system to Santa. Our marketing guys
have been tearing their hair out for the past six months trying to
update the customer database.
Apparently the system won't accept "no longer believes" as a valid
reason for losing a customer - so we just don't know how to manage
the customer process for thousands and thousands of people. It
doesn't help if your customer is still expecting the full mince-pie
and sherry treatment, when we deliver the "no-frills"
dump-it-and-go service.
Unfortunately it's not just the challenge of integrating our legacy
and e-systems that's keeping me awake at nights. We could have
serious problems with the data protection people because it seems
that every time someone sends us an e-mail with their Christmas
list, we are exporting personal data outside the EU.
This is a nightmare, as most of this data is unsolicited in the
first place. I have tried to explain this to Brussels but they just
don't want to understand; the law is the law and it is there to
protect the consumer. So if my next report is from Ford Open
Prison, you'll know that the EU lawyers have finally found an IT
director to jail.
Thankfully, I got here just in time to stop the new Web site going
live prematurely. It was supposed to be a "limited" pilot - just a
few pages of HTML, nothing behind it, you know the sort of thing.
Too true, I know the sort of thing. The me-too dotcom disaster sort
of thing.
It's all very well being all gung-ho about e-business but it takes
more than a few fancy Web pages to make a business. If traditional
retailing is all about location, e-business is all about
fulfilment, fulfilment, fulfilment - we ignore this rule at our
peril. Yes, it is easy to get "something" up and running on the Web
very quickly these days. Yes, it is easy to change things quickly
too. But if you haven't got rock-solid fulfilment processes in
place, you are going to repent at leisure as your business
fails.
So, as Christmas Eve draws closer, my sleep becomes more and more
restless. During the long winter nights I have desperately tried to
remember the original headhunter's call. I could have sworn he said
something about lapdancers, but it must have been Laplanders...
Better get my hearing checked before I am dropped in it
again.
Happy Christmas everyone and, if you don't get the presents you
hoped for, don't blame me. It's all Bill Gates' fault, for writing
that damned book. In the meantime, you should call our Customer
Service Centre - it's open 48 hours a day, just holler up the
nearest chimney.
Are you of good cheer?
Do you feel hearty or is it all
humbug?
>
>Send Colin your Christmas message.Colin Beveridge is an interim executive who has held
top-level roles in IT strategy, development, services and support.
His travels along the blue-chip highway have taken him to a clutch
of leading corporations, such as Shell, British Petroleum, ICI, DHL
and Powergen.