A year and a day ago Deseret Book went "live" on a new Oracle ERP and Retail Point-of-Sale system. This new system replaced a legacy system that had evolved over twenty years (driven in large part by the then-CFO).
The legacy system wasn't built using sexy technology. It was terminal/console based rather than sporting a graphical user interface. It was built on top of a Pick database rather than on a more "mainstream" relational database management system.
Niel Nickolaisen parachuted in, largely at the parent company's request, to act as the first ever CIO to oversee the change. (Previously the position he filled had vacillated between "VP of Information Technology" and "Director of Information Technology"; it's back to the latter now.)
Niel has an impressive resume, and is one of the most networked people I've ever met. Personality wise, he is a nice guy and fairly easy to get along with. Over time I came to realize that networking was his true passion because while Deseret Book may have been Niel's job #1, his job #0 was promoting Niel Inc.
A classic example of this is that though go live was February 26, 2004 he already had gotten an article written up in CIO magazine promoting his strategy and visionary leadership of this system change out by March 15, 2004.
In the article Niel lays out a classification matrix for segmenting and ranking project priorities. The theory isn't all that bad. It's fairly common sense. The big picture looks pretty good. But the devil (execution wise especially) is in the details, and that's where the wheels fell off the bus during his watch.
The article doesn't mention that go live was premature, that it happened because having given the CEO a date he stuck to it rather than lose face, regardless of what the business users (or IT staff) involved said or thought. Or that the "cost savings" of 40% to 70% were bogus because even a year later the project hasn't fully crossed the finish line. Or that the quotes from Sheri Dew were obviously ghost-written, because they're certainly not phrased in her style. (Whether she gave permission to have them attributed to her at the time or not, I don't know. But I do know that by April or May, and beyond, that she certainly wouldn't have, and any quotes she would have given would have been so damning they'd never have been printed in CIO.)
In other words, by many criteria, the change out was not a roaring success but rather typical of the painful IT changes that go over time and budget most everywhere. Even if it eventually pans out to be a net-win it certainly wasn't all roses when the article was written.
But Niel's moved on (getting out of Dodge, a cynic might say, one step ahead of the law). Left behind, the frontline employees across the company (finance, procurement, call center, retail stores) all trudge along trying to make the best of what they rightly preceive as a bad situation. Management lacks solid reports to know for sure how the business is performing.
Additional man power has been brought to bear in many areas. One example being the call center, where pointing and clicking in the 21st century takes three times as long as typing in the 20th did. That's a big deal when the majority of your annual business comes during the Christmas season. IT headcount has grown by more than 25%. That's all part of the price of progress, I guess.
For Niel it was a success. He came in to be a high-paid hero to save the day. He marketed himself extremely well (also earning a 2004 midsize-market CIO of the year award from Gartner) while he was here, and left to go do the next gig when the self-promotion opportunities had started to dry up and the peasants were rounding up their torches and pitchforks. (Though he got published again in CIO datelined October 10, 2004–several weeks after he'd resigned.)
I truly stand in awe of his accomplishments.
—Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, February 27, 2005 at 21:42