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| IT capabilities | ||
 GRAB@PIZZAhas an IT budget in excess of 3% of company turnover. The IT staff number 600 employees who perform applications development and maintenance and IT infrastructure support.  |
What are the 'capabilities' of the IT organisation, seen from the perspective of Business & IT alignment?
'Quality' capabilities' GRAB@PIZZA In terms of 'Quality' capabilities business operations managers stressed "Customer and service support for business users" of IT as a key dissatisfier. Some of the informations systems are becoming more 'mission critical'. End user support to assist users with functional queries is poor and support staff are difficult to contact or they have no insight into how the systems work. The central IT services department invested $250.000 dollars in improving IT support capabilities. A state of the art 'Help desk' tool was purchased in an effort to improve end-user support, speed of incident resolution and a lowering of support costs. The implementation of the tool have now resulted in the customers declaring 'If you want to hear some music just phone the Help desk!...',or if you want to be insulted...just wait until one of the technoids picks up the phone. The tool does not integrate well with the automated systems management tools, although this was one of the sales pitches for making the initial investment. POS operators also complain at the lack of availability of support staff and the level of support provided. One Franchise manager tried reporting a problem on his POS and was asked 'What is a POS?'. |
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'Change' capabilities' At GRAB@PIZZA POS (Point of Sales) systems are used in 1200 Franchise operations for managing restaurant orders. Franchise managers (Business operation managers) and distribution managers (Business process managers for supply chain and logistics) require IT to be able to accomodate the roll-out of POS systems consistently and on time. At the same time to ensure business continuity, availability and reliability of systems. A major systems failure during the Superbowl week-end caused loss of sales and damaged the reputation GRAB@PIZZA to Customers. The manager responsible for Franchise operations allowed regional decision making in buying the cheapest systems available in an effort to speed up deployment and avoid the bureacracy of the recently introduced IT change procedures, resulting in multiple hardware and software systems. Subsequently the Franchise manager is no longer in service, nor the IT directior, nor the change process. The IT configuration and asset tracking cannot specify which POS system or software is used at each franchise unit. When POS software updates are released IT staff travel far and wide to install software releases, and expensive contracts have to be signed with various software suppliers for updating POS systems with Grab@ required functionality. 'Business added value' capabilities Business process managers for supply chain and logists wanted to realise efficiency improvements in ordering and restocking as well as realise cost savings.'Compatibility' between systems and integration of busines functionality is an issue. The POS systems are supposed to be able to integrate directly to distribution centre systems. The last time that the systems were integrated POS servers locked out during store hours. |
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 After 2000's record 338 million pizzas, the old ordering system and nightly batch processing were groaning under the load. The company also wanted a system that operated in real time and integrated with its PeopleSoft Inc. supply-chain application, said GRAB@PIZZA director of information technology. |
'Capacity' capabilities, IT performance But in GRAB@PIZZA lab tests, the PeopleSoft transactions were often delayed or even muscled off the network by more aggressive applications. GRAB@PIZZA IT operators took things into their own hands and started abandoning jobs and tuning systems. They tuned them so well they stopped all together. IT specialists sought a tool that would let them control application traffic proactively. "PacketShaper 1000s are used to optimize traffic on the 128K bit/sec. access links that connect GRAB@PIZZA's distribution centers to its wide-area network." The traffic software used up more processing power than ever causing the need to upgrade processing power on all servers. |
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| IS capabilities | ||
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Applications management has its own clearly defined set of standard operating practices
characterised by throwing it over the wall and denying any responsibility when systems fall in a heap.
A bug that was created during a functional update to the POS systems wasn't detected until end of year processing. It
only occured on certain systems. Trying to track the original code changes and which systems were affected was difficult.
Undocumented changes were made and it was unclear which POS systems had the new 'feature' as the POS specialist has left
the company.
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| Information is everything.... | ||
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"Information is the lifeblood of an organisation" IT specialists tell us. " For us it's dough and sauce.." replies big Nik. "Are information models adequate for enterprise analusis?" |
 Part of our IS strategy was to integrate the legacy and the new systems that comprise our supply chain. The Supply chain manager read an article about 'Enterprise Application Integration(EAI)' and said this is what we needed. We subcontracted a small IT firm "EAI-R-US" to integrate our information systems. The first 6 months were spent trying to figure out our companies data models (at enormous expense). Our internal IS had poorly documented data models and information models. Then we found out that EAI-R-US had little experience in our type of branch. Some of the programmers they sent were fresh out of high-school and hadn't yet written a real piece of code. We spent a lot of money and didn't get the business benefits we wanted.The aim had been to reduce supply chain wastage costs by $2 million dollars...We spent $2 million dollars with our IT suppliers. |
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| Business added value capabilities | ||
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They talk about the Business & IT value chain..." I see IT more as a chain around our neck!.... |
'Business Added Value' capabilities. GRAB@PIZZA is in an aggressive,competitive business. GRAB@PIZZA is an innovative company, we have a leading edge sauce and dough. Innovation is what makes a difference in this business. We wnat to be the number 1 Pizza company in the world. This means being innovative in all areas of operations. Even in toilet cleaning technology for our restaurants. We read articles about IT being used as an innovation tool and business enabler. However we see little innovation coming from IT. One of our strategic goals is increasing customer reach. We are sure that the Internet offers us possibilitie to extend our customer reach, however we don't seem able to execute on this vision.  |
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| IT added value | ||
 They asked me how we steered IT on added value...After I fell off my stool laughing I suggested I would be happy if we could steer on this scorecard... |
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| Standards | ||
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The previous IT director started a campaign of introducing standards. Application Service Library (ASL) and the Information Technology Infrastructurre Library (ITIL) were suggested following a visit to a PinkElephant presentation in Orlando. |
'Control' capabilities GRAB@PIZZA business management was questioned "Does IT have its own internal processes under control?. The response was "..if we delivered Pizzas with the same quality they deliver new IT solutions we'd be out of business!". The IT director in response to complaints visited an IT service manager conference in Orlando. He couldn't remember too much about the Orlando conference due to a 'corona beer' induced hang-over. The IT organisation responded with it's usual enthusiasm for change. "oh another change?". Projects were initiated to improve the processes. After 6 months of confusion, frustration and increased user dissatisfaction these standards were no longer developed and IT staff went back to the old, tried and tested ways of working...or should we say not working. |
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| IT growth | ||
| ...One of our IT specialists bought a copy of 'Planning to implement service management' Best practice which described a growth phase model for IT organisations, he also obtained a copy of 'Not the IT Infrastructure library made worse' (worst case practice). I suspect he mixed up the 'Best practice' and the 'worst practice' books and tried to realise the following level of IT organisational maturity. | ||
| Vision & Strategy | GRAB@PIZZA IT strategy is to boldly go where no IT organisation has been before and to mess it up big time... |
| Steering | GRAB@PIZZA The IT organisation has little insight into costs or cost control, it has a poor succes rate on project performance, especially major projects. Management reports are produced,which nobody reads or can understand. SLA's are being introduced, to bring the user community under control. |
| Processes | GRAB@PIZZA Core IS/IT processes are applications development characterised by poor testing and lack of business involvement followed by throwing it over the wall to IT. The IT core processes are the service support capabilities and managing to consume most of the processing power themselves with systems and network management tools that grind the real-time systems to a halt. |
| Technology | GRAB@PIZZA IT systems and network management tools are used in abundance. point solution tools to manage everything that bleeps. Although the hardware and network platforms are robust the applications systems are described as yo-yo systems. |
| People & competences | GRAB@PIZZA Our people can best be described as Technoids. They speak in technobbable. We are about to employ our third IT director....or is it fourth? who is now called a CIO (Career Is Over). |
| Culture | GRAB@PIZZA IT culture can best be described as 'technology focussed'. Some of them are aware that customers exists. very few of them understand anything about the business except how to order a Pizza on the night shifts. |
