By Charles F. Moreira
Many organisations around the world implement their IT systems without considering the alignment factor between their business processes and IT initiatives. This often results in misalignment of these two very important elements. IronHorse, founded by Stan Singh, aims to help organisations with such problems and beyond.
According to Iron Horse founder Stan Singh, this ‘misalignment usually results in various business processes and data disparities which at the end of the day could potentially lead to increase in implementation and maintenance costs.
“At the same time the organisation does not get to reap all the full benefits from such an IT project implementation. More importantly it is often detrimental to the business,” said Stan.
Having played leading roles in major IT projects within the hospitality and retail industries since 1979, and having been a member of the PIKOM Council for well over 11 years, Stan now is the principal consultant at IronHorse Asia, a company he founded recently to help organisations with these problems.
Still not jiving
“Proposed systems look OK during vendor’s demonstrations but during actual implementation, users generally find huge gaps, some of lesser importance but others are major and sometimes these gaps can be a show stopper during the system implementation process and critically, sometimes these gaps show up half way through the project life cycle. In such cases, modifications become inevitable and unavoidable as a ‘way out’ especially if such gaps appear to be critical to the operations or desperately required by the business. In this scenario, projects are usually delayed and at the same time cost increases, while these project implementors’ competency also becomes questionable,” said Stan.
“Some implementors believe and think that just because they have undertaken one project before, they can duplicate its implementation to map across other clients, but the fact remains that no two businesses, or I should state, that no two or similar retailers operate in the same way, even though if they were to carry the same inventory type,” Stan added.
Mind you, while the retail industry has many business segments and not just Head Office & Stores operations to consider, there are a number of other ‘sub-industry’ segments within the overall retail spectrum or the Retail ecosystem.
The Iron Horse founder emphasised that one needs to understand how all this is inter-connected and functions, and how everything in various business units integrates with one another as part of the close loop or end-to-end process.
“Otherwise the Retailer is not able to take full advantage of such IT implementation in their business. What’s more going forward, if there is a new business strategy or an expansion plan that the Retailer is seeking to implement as part of their ongoing growth plan, what will happen next especially if the organisation does not have any overall visibility?
“Equally it is completely hopeless to bolt systems or processes on top of one another as part of the new initiative and as seen over the many years, that is exactly what is happening across such implementations and one often ends up wondering ‘where did we go wrong and with so much cost incurred yet we failed to meet the objective.’”
HiYo Silver! & Tonto
In his younger days, Stan was a cowboy film buff and named his consultancy Iron Horse after the native Indian term for the steam engine.
“I realised that during that period depicted in those films, trains were the only mode of transport in the inter-city business and retailing supply chain, and that trains and the tracks they run on are similar to business and IT processes today,” said Stan. “The train’s wheels must be aligned with the track or it will derail, and many business failures have been due to the misalignment of business and IT processes.”
Iron Horse Asia’s five consultants including Stan, together have over 64 years experience in consulting, development, implementation and training related to IT systems. It’s a Malaysian entity and the “Asia” comes from the dot-asia top-level domain name in its website.
“Business is about people and people is about business and if one can understand the perimeters and the parameters of the ecosystem of an organisation, the business rules it operates by and industry best practices with a view to identify and to recognise the gaps and shortcomings, then project managers today can align any system.
“It’s all about what the customer is today and where they want to be tomorrow,” said Stan.
“Retail is a very dynamic and complex industry, where there’s much turnover of IT staff and operational staff, resulting in new employees bringing old habits from their previous experience into their new organisation, and after they convince management that modifications need to be made to the system, whether they turn out to be good or bad, but after they leave, everything comes to a standstill. Sadly, this process continues especially where there is a lack in control.
“For example, at Laura Ashley, we discovered that when the IT system was implemented, not its management but its business users ‘demanded’ some 200 modifications which were made and it took 18 months to deliver, by which time most of the staff who requested them had either left or moved on to another department and later during an IT audit exercise it was discovered that less than 5% of those modifications were actually used, while some did not even know they were made, while the implementation and maintenance costs went up.
So today, I would request to know from users that when a particular modification is requested by them, my question forward would be such that if the requested modification cannot benefit the customer, organisation or resolve any disparity or gap in a given process that potentially has risk element to it, then this will be REJECTED. Ultimately they must be able to demonstrate the ROI even if it’s in intangible form.”
“However, with the right processes and systems well established (like a country’s constitution), organisations will experience stability,” he added.
Would cloud computing solve such problems?
“No. Cloud will help reduce IT costs to an extent but the same problems will remain without the right, philosophy, policies and best practices in place,” Stan replied.
Read Part 2 here
