Prologue
Amelia Lee, Senior Manager of International Finance, arrived at her office in Building 14 of Perspect Visions, Inc. (PVI) at 7:00am on Monday. She was there early to prepare for a meeting with her boss, Alex Papagallos, VP of International Finance. As she walked into her office area with a cup of tea she got from the company cafeteria, she let out a big sigh of relief when she saw that the movers had delivered her boxes during the weekend. It was the fifth time she had to move her office in the last six months. The company was growing so fast and had undergone a series of reorganization resulting in the displacement of almost everyone working on "campus", as the company's Silicon Valley headquarters was fondly called.
Amelia cleared some boxes so that she could reach her desk. When she turned on her workstation and Apple Macintosh, the network did not come on. After fidgeting with the machines for a few minutes, she finally realized that the movers had moved her boxes but the corporate MIS group had not yet connected her machines onto the campus-wide LAN. Without the LAN connection she could not get to files stored on the servers nor could she work with her E-mail. With the meeting scheduled to begin in 45 minutes, Amelia scrambled down the hall to Steve Carson's office to find a machine that was connected so that she could do some work. Steve usually did not show up to work until 9 o'clock.
Before the start of the meeting Amelia took a break and put her folders into order. She took a sip of her now-cold tea and pondered how her prepared discussion with Alex would go. She knew that she had better take advantage of his presence because he was expected to go on another trip to Europe later on in the week. The Global Information System Project that her International Finance Group was responsible for had a shaky start. The project had been in the planning stage for the last six months and the group had yet to finish with the preliminary analysis of the system's requirements. Amelia was also apprehensive because the country was starting to recover from a recession but the Silicon Valley was still lagging behind in the recovery. As a result, PVI had not rescinded a hiring freeze order instituted a year ago. There was some talk about more cutbacks. The project was very demanding and she was short of staff. She looked out of the window of the borrowed office at the vacant lot across from Building 14. The company recently purchased the lot for $17 million and would soon start construction of its new headquarters building at the site. Amelia wondered how the construction noise and disruption would affect her work environment.
Perspect Visions, Inc. was started in 1982 by John Admonson
as an entrepreneurial venture into the production of very
specialized computer graphics workstations. John was a
professor of Computer Science at a famous east coast
university until 1980, when he moved to the west searching
for something more interesting to do. He and his family
settled in the San Francisco peninsula area known to the
rest of the world as the Silicon Valley. He had a lot of
great ideas about how he wanted to develop a family of
graphics workstations for the highly-demanding engineering
and scientific computing market. John was a well-known
visionary in his field and he had no problems in obtaining
venture capital to start the business. The first office for
the company was located in Mountain View and as the company
grew, it moved to its present location in Sunnyvale.
The graphics workstation produced by the company was very
sophisticated and powerful. The strength of the machine laid
in its circuits. John Admonson invented a technique of
storing commonly-used graphics computing functions in a
series of custom chips. Thus the workstation was able to
produce graphics at a much higher speed than if the
functions were executed with software routines (as was
commonly employed by other vendors). The ability to produce
graphics at high speed was always in demand by the
engineering and scientific computing community. PVI's
products were much sought after and the company turned a
profit during the third year of its existence. Since then,
the company had been able to more than sustain its niche in
the market. In 1986, sales hit the $10 million mark.
In 1987, PVI introduced a new family of graphics
workstations with price/performance ratios that surpassed
all the other vendors in the market. This family of
workstations attracted a lot of new buyers as well as those
who switched from other vendors' machines. These new PVI
machines, nicknamed "Aurora", provided customers with very
attractive price/performance as well as ease-of-conversion.
From its start PVI had adopted UNIX as the operating system
for all its machines. The open architecture of UNIX provided
PVI customers a comfortable and familiar platform to work
with, and PVI could take advantage of the many third party
software products available for lateral market support.
The "Aurora" product line really propelled PVI into the
limelight of the industry. It was hailed as revolutionary,
and by 1990 the sales of PVI reached $150 million. Since
then the company had been consistent in developing new
products and was enjoying continued growth.
During these growth years PVI aggressively expanded its
marketing overseas. The first overseas office was opened in
Switzerland in 1986. Since then PVI had opened offices in
many countries all over the world, with overseas production
facilities first established outside Bern in 1989. In the
early 1990's, the European operations had grown tremendously
and PVI's European headquarters opened in Geneva in 1991. In
1994, the office had a staff of 25 people.
PVI was very proud of its international business and its
status as a player in the global market place. Figure 1
shows part of a PVI sales brochure touting the more than
thirty countries where PVI had subsidiaries or sales
offices.
A series of events in 1992-1993 greatly changed the
corporate make-up of PVI. The country's economy was slowly
spiraling down into a recession and the demand for high-tech
products stalled. PVI, like many U.S. corporations, went
into retrenchment and downsizing.
It cut about 8% of its
work force within a period of 6 months and morale in the
company plummeted. At the same time the biggest supplier of
custom chips to PVI, NanoTek Corp. of San José, was
experiencing insolvency problems. Although there were at
least three other manufacturers in the US who could supply
PVI with these chips, NanoTek Corp. had been the most
reliable and the quality of its products had always been
dependable. That was why NanoTek had received the lion's
share of PVI's orders and the two companies shared a special
relationship. Industrial Microsystems, Inc. (IMI), a fierce
competitor of PVI, started courting NanoTek in the beginning
of 1993 and rumors about a hostile takeover were abound. The
Board of Directors and Executive Council of PVI met in a
retreat in Marin County during a weekend in January and came
up with a preemptive strategy. If NanoTek Corp. were to be
acquired by a competitor, PVI would have to re-establish the
relationship with another supplier. This would take time,
and in the interim, PVI might not be able to sustain its
growth or even worse, its own existence could be threatened.
Furthermore, IMI's move was viewed as being offensive in
nature since IMI had its own chip manufacturing capability
and there was but one motive for acquiring NanoTek - cut off
the dependable supply of custom chips to PVI.
The PVI Board of Directors authorized the Executive Council
to begin discussions with NanoTek about a merger. The merger
was to be financed by a stock swap - two shares of NanoTek
for one of PVI's. The negotiations went on in secret for two
months. Very few people at PVI knew of the move. Many at PVI
were still reeling from the recent round of personnel cuts.
On May 1st, President John Admonson called a company meeting
and announced the impending merger after an intense two-day
negotiating session with the representatives of NanoTek. The
meeting was broadcast to all the workstations on campus
using PVI's own desk-top conferencing
capability. All
overseas offices were hooked up with video conferencing so
that all the employees were there for the message. John made
an impassioned speech about the merger and explained why the
company took the step amid its own cutback and a
recessionary atmosphere. The Board believed that if NanoTek
were allowed to flounder or to be acquired by a competitor,
PVI's own existence would be threatened. It was better to
merge with NanoTek and expand the company vertically so that
the company could control its own destiny than to be thrown
into the mercy of someone else's hands. The speech was
politely received by the employees, but many of them
expressed disbelief about how 200 or more employees from
NanoTek were to be accommodated.
Wall Street did not take the news as politely. Many analysts
believed that the merger move was diluting the value of PVI
stocks. Two days after the announcement, PVI stock prices
fell from $20 to an all-time low of $7. It was generally
believed that the stock price did not fall any lower because
the market had a lot of respect for PVI's technology and the
acumen of its management. Patrick O'Brian, Senior Director
of Public Relations, was credited with this phenomenon
because of his constant nurturing of relationships with Wall
Street analysts. He believed that part of his job was to
"educate" Wall Street because many of the analysts still did
not have a very good understanding of the technology and
were still dubious about some Silicon Valley successes.
NanoTek Corp. became a fully-owned subsidiary of PVI on
November 1, 1993. The merger turned out to be a tremendous
success. John Admonson said, in an interview with a trade
newspaper in the beginning of 1994, that in addition to
being able to "sleep well" knowing that the supply of custom
chips was secure, PVI had also gained an R&D capability in
chip design and manufacturing. He let it be known that PVI
and NanoTek were in the process of developing a new
generation of RISC CPU's that would be used to drive PVI's
workstations for many years to come.
The merger of the two companies created a much bigger
company. At the end of 1994, combining PVI's sales of $550
million and NanoTek's contribution of $450 million, the
total sales of the company broke the $1 billion barrier (see
Figure 2). The forecast for the company was good and it was
expected to double its sales by the year 2000.
The International Finance Group was set up in 1990 as a
spin-off from the Corporate Finance Group to deal with the
increasing volume of international business. The Group had
undergone many re-organizational and personnel changes. Alex
Papagallos was the VP in charge of this group and he also
had dotted line responsibility over all the other financial
operations overseas. He reported directly to Bob Kingman,
Senior VP of World Trade, and indirectly to John Mansfield,
the Corporate Controller. Figures 3 and 4 show the
organization chart of PVI and the current makeup of the
International Finance Group respectively.
Alex had been working in the Valley for many years. Most
recently he was an Associate VP of Finance at the Adstar
Division of IBM. There his responsibilities ranged over a
wide area and he was considered a rising star. It took a
considerable effort on the part of PVI's management to
recruit him from IBM. At that time the International Finance
Group was in a chaotic state after the forced departure of
an ineffective executive. He estimated that in this job he
traveled about 45% of the time.
When Alex arrived at PVI in the beginning of 1994 he found a
frustrated group of employees barely held together by the
manager, Amelia Lee. Amelia's former boss had left the
company in June 1993 during the height of the consolidation
with NanoTek Corp. The position remained vacant for 6
months, leaving the group without any executive leadership.
Alex began by reviewing everyone under him and started to
put his mark on the Group. At the end of his first month at
PVI, he had a meeting with the Group and said to them:
"I am new here and I have a lot to learn. I have been
assured by the Executive Council that the consolidation
efforts are under control and things will return to
normal soon. I hope that we can all work together to
strengthen the Group's organization and help the
company expand into the 21st century. One thing I have
experienced so far that is very frustrating is that Bob
(Kingman) keeps asking me for information about
international sales and I have not been able to get
them to him. I know it is not your fault and you have
all worked very hard. But what I am seeing is
intolerable. We must have the information. I don't mean
stapling faxes from the European countries together, I
mean real, meaningful and useful information that Bob
and I can use. At IBM I was able to retrieve the
information I needed from my desktop PC and here I
can't even get the right faxes from the overseas
subsidiaries. I have talked to Bob and he has agreed in
principle for me to head an effort to develop an
international financial database for
this company. We
are going to call it GLOBIS (GLObal Business
Information System). He has already told me some
concepts of the information that he wants out of such a
system. I think that the system would best be
implemented using a database with a
client/server
architecture and it will have to be up and running 24
hours a day so that updates from all over the world
could be processed. I have told Bob that we should aim
for inauguration of the system in 1Q95. I believe we
definitely need a system like this to support the
strategic planning and decisions of PVI executives in
order to remain competitive in our arena. We might be
the only company in the whole industry that does not
already have a system like this as part of the
company's infrastructure."
Alex wanted to build up the organization of the
International Finance Group but was constantly frustrated by
the company's on-again-off-again hiring freeze. More than
half the people in his organization were hired before his
arrival and with his travel schedule, he was unable to be
there to interview some of the new hires. He had expressed
to a colleague how hard it was to play a hand when one
couldn't even see the deck and be there for the deal.
Amelia Lee, Senior Manager of IFG's corporate component,
worked directly for Alex. Amelia joined the company in 1989,
after she moved from Seattle with her family. Her husband
worked at the Mountain View plant of GA-COMP, one of the
largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world. Amelia's
first job at PVI was as an assistant controller in one of
the product divisions. From there she moved to IFG as a
senior analyst in 1992. Her current position became
available when the incumbent staff member came down with
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The IFG had a reputation of being
a difficult department to manage, and three executives had
gone through the revolving door in the past four years. For
a period of six months during 1993, the position was left
vacant as the senior executives struggled with what to do
with the organization and whom to hire. In her position,
Amelia had never had a full-year review with her boss. Her
promotion to her present position as Senior Manager was
championed by the Corporate Controller in 1993, when she was
the most senior person in the IFG.
Amelia had been managing the process of closing all the
international books each month. The process required each
foreign subsidiary and office to provide IFG with financial
information and transactions so that IFG could consolidate
them into the company's international financial statement.
As the company expanded rapidly into the international
market, the work of the IFG had become increasingly more
complex. Amelia had also been actively involved with a
mentoring program where women managers and executives played
mentoring roles to new hires. During a recent discussion
with a woman just hired into the Customer Services Group,
she tried to explain the function of her organization:
"The IFG plays a very important role in the company. We
are dealing with over half of the company's revenues
coming from over 30 sub's and sales offices all over
the world. It is challenging because it requires you to
know and understand the company's business, to be a
diplomat in dealing with all the overseas colleagues,
and a technical wizard in dealing with very complex
accounting and finance issues. On the other hand, by
the nature of the organization's function in having to
deal with so many variables remotely, it can also be
very frustrating. For example, Alex and Bob are
constantly demanding information about how the sub's
are doing and I have no systematic way of obtaining the
information. Each time I have to call the right people
and plead with them to send me the info. The info could
come in by fax, by E-mail, by phone, by overnight
courier or, at one time, by airmail. During the monthly
close, my staff spent
45-65% of their time inputting
this info into the computer so that we could analyze
and consolidate. Quite often we find mistakes such as
typos and numbers not tying together and we have to
research and find the right answers. Last month a sub
in Eastern Europe faxed us a few pages of numbers and
none of the columns footed correctly.
During the worst month we had last year, we did not
know how much international business we did the
previous month until the 15th. I had to stall the
executives until we had all the correct figures in.
Since then we have experimented with electronic
transfer of the information. With some of the bigger
countries, we have had some luck. For example, we were
able to receive monthly information from Switzerland in
the form of a spreadsheet file attachment to E-mail
message. They are tied to us through a leased line into
our network here on campus. It was as easy as
transferring files to another person's computer in the
next building. The medium to smaller countries are not
tied-in at all. They have to somehow use a modem to
transfer the information to Switzerland and through the
E-mail system there to transfer to us. In many of these
countries, we only have an office with a small staff
and when they have technical problems, no technical
people are available on-site to help them. One time I
got a call at 3AM my time from an accountant of an
Eastern European country who was having problems
hooking up the modem. His country did not have modular
telephone connection jacks and the equipment we sent
them could not be connected without being installed by
the government-run phone company. There was a six-month
wait for service. He was in a panic and I had to calm
him down. I couldn't understand his explanations and I
was sympathetic with his frustration with RS232 ports,
RJ11 jacks and cables. I decided then we would accept
his figures on a fax, at least for that month. Now that
is only the European region. There is no hub like
Switzerland in Asia and South America.....
I have traveled to some of our foreign subsidiaries and
met most of the country managers and controllers when
they were here for meetings. It took me a while but I
think I have been able to establish a working
relationship with most of them. Japan is one of our
biggest sub's in Asia and our business there is
expanding. I visited there about three months ago and I
enjoyed the country and its sights. I did not have a
good visit with the staff, though. My reception there
was not as warm as I expected and I did not even have a
chance to have dinner with the country manager and
controller. I went out to have dinner with Annie who
was traveling with me. I have always enjoyed visiting
Switzerland. Robert Trent-Windom, the director of
Finance, Europe, works out of that office. He got the
job about four months ago and moved there from England
where he was the country controller. I am still trying
to figure him out. But he has become Alex's golden boy
in Europe and last month during the annual marketing
conference in Hawaii, they went scuba diving and
golfing together.
I haven't even begun telling you about our function
here, not to mention that we have to deal with 56
different currencies and we have to perform some of the
company's treasury functions such as foreign currency hedging, etc......
Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of crossed-
wires and messages. The other day I returned from a
two-day off-site meeting and both my E-mail and voice-
mail boxes were full. That is a total of 320 messages.
Maybe they should change my job title to "Information
Traffic Manager". I could cc: or forward 80-90% of the
messages. The remaining 10-20% required my personal
attention."
Amelia had a long talk with Alex when he first arrived, and
they discussed her job and her plans for the group. She
vented her frustration about the lack of executive
leadership and the constant reorganization that her Group
had experienced. One of her complaints was that for every
two steps she moved the Group forward, some other forces in
the company moved it back one. She put forth her short-term
goal as being able to cut the amount of time her Group
needed to close the international books each month from the
current five days to three. "Dare we think of closing in two
days?", she mused. When asked what she foresaw as the
biggest problem that she was going to face in achieving this
goal, she contemplated a while before answering. She
eventually replied that the biggest problem that needed to
be solved was the standardization of the different
platforms, formats and techniques that were employed by the
sub's in processing and transmitting information back to
Sunnyvale.
Alex also reviewed with Amelia all the personnel in the
Group. Amelia rated Annie Kevarian as the worker who had the
right skills, attitude and best work ethic in the Group. She
felt that Annie should be nurtured and groomed to become a
manager because she had the right attributes. Quite a few of
the people working in the Group had either moved on or
transferred to other departments during the turbulent period
in the company. Most of those remaining in the Group now
were relatively new hires.
The project to develop GLOBIS (GLObal Business Information
System) was started in mid 1994. Alex, with himself as
chair, set up a steering committee to oversee the whole
project. The committee members were Amelia Lee, Sanichi
Nakamura, Robert Trent-Windom, and a representative from
each of the functional areas in the company (i.e.,
Engineering, Marketing, Planning, Manufacturing, and Human
Resources; see Figure 3). They had their first meeting in
June, but after two hours of heated debate, they could not
even agree on accepting the name of the project. With Alex's
travel schedule, he could not attend all the meetings and so
he asked Amelia to conduct the meetings in his absence. The
committee originally planned to meet once a month, but it
soon became obvious that they needed to meet more often in
order to move the project along. They then started to have
weekly meetings and the atmosphere improved. They worked on
a preliminary analysis of the system's requirements. Each
person in the committee contributed a list of
data items
they thought would be useful for the system to track. Amelia
kept the list updated and as of last count, it contained 254
data items. When they discussed some of the items, they
found that the same data item was called by different names
at different locations in the company. For example, one of
the product divisions wanted to keep track of customers. To
them, a customer was someone who had bought something from
them in the last two years. To the Customer Services Group,
a customer was someone who had bought from the company or
had contracted with the company for service. The committee
spent a lot of time discussing and arguing about the semantics
of many of the data items, and quite a few issues were
unresolved. The discussion had to be tabled in order for the
business of the committee to proceed.
As part of the committee's information gathering process, Amelia
sent out a Computer Equipment Survey to
all the subsidaries to
try to find out what type of computers and related equipment
were being used (see Appendix A). Responses were slow in coming.
Alex did attend some of the meetings while he was in town.
He came out of one of the meetings and confided to another
executive that the project was not progressing at an
acceptable rate and that it was heading in the wrong
direction. He said:
"The people in the committee are arguing about the
issues such as how many characters should be in the
customer address. After so many meetings they still
have not agreed on a design and they have not even
started talking about what vendor products to deploy.
At this rate they won't get to the network issues until
sometime next year. While our competitors are cruising
along the Information SuperHighway, we are languishing here
debating about the number of bytes in a field. I need
to rethink this process. Maybe we need to bring in some
outside expertise. When I was at IBM, we actually
brought in our consulting division and occasionally we
even used the services of Andersen Consulting. As they
say, 'I don't care about the color of the cat, so long
as it catches mice.' We really have to move on with
this project. I promised Bob we would launch this in
1Q95. I am hearing a lot about why certain things can't
be done or why certain information can't be made
available. If the process and procedures are not
adequate to support what we want, maybe we should
reengineer the whole process. It is about time we
rethink the way we do business and not be satisfied
with the status quo."
Sanichi Nakamura and Robert Trent-Windom, the two Directors
of Finance of overseas regions, flew in for the first
meeting of the committee. Since then they had participated
in the frequent meetings by video-conferencing. Their images
appeared on separate PVI monitors in the conference room.
Robert Trent-Windom participated actively in the discussion
and raised some of complex issues that the committee left
unresolved. Among them were whether the proposed system
would have the capability to handle amounts specified in
different currencies and to provide decision support for
setting markups for different sales regions.
Sanichi Nakamura occasionally chimed in with a comment and
suggestion during those meetings. He seemed to be above the
fray when the debate became heated in the Sunnyvale
conference room. When Alex asked him what he thought about
the project so far, he said:
"In some of these meetings, I hear a lot of veiled
references to how the sub's are not supplying Sunnyvale
with the right information or the wrong information was
sent in. You have to understand that in some of our
sales offices, we have maybe a sales manager, two sales
people and a receptionist/typist/accounting clerk. You
guys are asking for a lot of new information that we
don't have or that is too difficult to keep track of. I
know that Global Bob (Kingman's nickname) wants to know
down to a penny how much we have in inventory and how
much we have shipped to each customer in each country
within the last 24 hours. We just don't have the human
resources and systems to keep track of this information
in order to feed it back to Sunnyvale. Some of our
sales offices do not even have computers. Many of those
that do run a version of a DOS-like operating system
that recognizes Kanji. Some of our information are kept
in the country's native language. I think GLOBIS is a
great idea, but is the company going to hire more
people for me to work on this at my site? Robert
(Trent-Windom) loves this idea because he already has
the infrastructure and network to do some of these
things. I don't even have enough modems for all my
offices. The Asian region and the Pacific-Rim in
particular are very profitable and our sales have been
growing steadily. We are bigger than Africa and South
America combined and I believe we will soon surpass
European sales (see Figure 5). Just look at the
resources that the company has devoted to Europe, we
don't even have one tenth of what they got."
Joanne Nelson, VP of Marketing, attended the first meeting
of the committee with the designated representative from her
department. When each attendee was asked by Alex to give an
impression of what the proposed system should do, she
asserted:
"This system should have the capabilities of keeping
track of all the orders, sales and leads for the people
in the field as well as for analysis by management. I
would love to see a system that would allow us to
analyze the data in multiple dimensions such as by
region, by product, by country, by salesperson, by
time-line, etc. I am sure Pat over at Planning would
agree with me that these capabilities are essential for
us to manage as well as plan. I would also like to see
the system help us keep track of customers so that the
data could be used for value-added applications in
marketing as well as for after-sales services."
Steve Carson had been working for PVI for about nine months
as a temporary consultant. He was brought in when the last
Information Systems (IS) staff member in IFG left. PVI was
paying a premium for his services because he was brought in
through a "body shop" (a temporary placement agency). Steve
had wanted to be hired as a permanent employee, but Amelia
could not get the requisition approved by the Human
Resources Department because of the ongoing hiring freeze.
The company preferred to handle it this way because temps
did not go into the official "head count" and, thus, were
paid out of a separate account. Steve was brought in to work
on the interface between IFG and Corporate Accounting
because he had worked on that software package before. He
had to write some COBOL programs on the company's
minicomputer to process and manipulate the data which were
uploaded from the Group's PC's and Mac's. These data were
transformed into transaction formats to feed into the
accounting software. He had also worked on the uploading of
data from the sub's using modems and from the European hub.
Amelia had asked him to sit in on the GLOBIS committee
meeting because she thought he might be able to provide some
technical insights.
When a new employee in the Group asked him about GLOBIS, he
said:
"I have not worked with a database before. But from
what I hear, it is made up of a bunch of flat files and
you relate them together with indexes. I am an active
member of the local DPMA (Data Processing Management
Association) and I have attended one of their
professional development seminars on writing COBOL code
for retrieving data from a database. I have not worked
with SQL yet, but I bet I can learn that easily. As to
working in a client/server architecture, isn't that the
same as time-sharing? I have been using time-sharing
since 1972. I can handle that."
Alan Cisneros just graduated with a Business degree from San
José State University. He had pursued a database track in
the Management Information Systems concentration. Amelia
hired him based on the recommendation of John Mansfield, the
Corporate Controller. Alan had worked for John for a year as
an intern before his graduation and left a good impression.
John asked Amelia to interview Alan when it looked like the
IFG was in need of extra staff, particularly in the IS area.
John told Amelia that Alan had the raw talent and good
educational foundation to build up his experience and
corporate knowledge. "Furthermore, the kid can communicate
and I would have no hesitation sending him down to talk with
a division GM (general manager) to ask for information,"
John added. Alan was invited back to San José State to be on
a panel of recent MIS graduates to talk about their new job
experience. His contributions were:
"I have a very exciting job because the company is in a
very dynamic market and my Group is right in the heart
of its business. As a matter of fact, more than half of
PVI's current sales comes from overseas (see Figure 5.
Although I am in a very junior position in the Group, I
have to deal with a lot of very senior people in the
company. I spend a lot of time communicating with
people on the phone (live or by voice mail), with E-
mail and fax. I did not realize before I got this job
that I would have to write so many E-mail and fax
messages. It would be equivalent to writing as many
memos in the old days. I have to be constantly on my
toes as to what I say and write. In addition to
learning a lot about the company's business by the
nature of these communications, I have also been
learning a lot technically. There is no company policy
and standard as to what computers are used in the
finance area. We have PC's, Mac's, PVI machines and
even some workstations powered by IMI chips. Of course,
we put tape over the logos of machines that are not
made by PVI. Some, but not all, of the machines are
connected to the company LAN. The situation regarding
platforms is worse overseas. We did an informal survey
not too long ago and we logged over twenty different
brand names of machines being used. Some of them are
clones
of clones and are not exactly compatible with
anything else. The software situation is even more
chaotic. We have the usual DOS, Windows, OS/2, and many
of the UNIX dialects. With applications, we run the
whole gamut of Lotus 1-2-3 (all possible versions),
Excel, WingZ, SuperCalc, etc. We have some sub's
actually doing their figures on a word-processing
package. We don't even have a standard within our group
in Sunnyvale, but we are moving towards Excel. We
usually spend more than ten hours per month re-entering
some of the data that the sub's send in because their
software is not compatible with ours....
I am also very excited about the future of my job. The
Group is engaging in this GLOBIS project that will
employ state-of-the-art technology. I hope to be
involved in the design and implementation of the
database so that I can exercise some of the skills that
I learned here....."
When asked by a student what he considered to be the most
important attributes to have in order to be successful in
his job, he replied:
"I consider communication skills, both verbal and
written, as the most important for me and I think the
company does also. After that, I think the willingness
to take risks and try out new things. I am not afraid
because I can leverage a lot of the things I learned
from school. I am not stepping out of a vacuum and I
can build on what I know already. Last but not least is
the ability to work with other people. Everything I do
at PVI involves some sort of group or team. I quickly
learned that I could still work effectively with
someone even though we disagree on certain issues
related to a project."
Annie Kevarian joined PVI one and a half years ago after
completing her MBA on a part-time basis from UC Berkeley.
After her annual performance review she had an interview
with the Human Resources Department manager. When the
manager suggested that she seemed very happy with her job,
Annie rejoined:
"Yeah, it is a very hard job and it can be very
exciting at times. But I constantly keep asking myself
where am I going with this job? Amelia is well
respected in the company and I don't see her moving
away soon, so where does that leave me? On the other
hand, I ask myself whether I really want her job at
all? I look at the hours she has to put in and I do not
really know whether I could do that if I were put into
her position."
David Sternman had been working as a financial analyst at
PVI for five years. He had been in IFG the longest. He had
some private thoughts about the situation:
"I don't know about this GLOBIS thing. Didn't the
Marketing department try this out about two years ago?
The corporate MIS department tried to develop the whole
thing on its own and it was supposed to run on the
mini. After about six months into the project and $2
million down the drain, they called it off. The
official story was that there was no need for such a
database. The unofficial story was that it was too big
for the MIS department to handle and they did not know
whether the mini could handle the workload. Another
story that circulated was that John Mansfield was
unhappy that it was not a financial database and he
squashed it. I think this Group is the right place to
house the effort because we have been dealing with most
of the needed data anyway. On the other hand, I do not
know if we have the right skills to actually do this.
This is a big technical project and if I were the
executive in charge, I would not have entrusted the
project to a bunch of CPA's (like myself) anyway. Also,
if I were the executive in charge of this group, and
history is any guide at all, I would not hang up too
many pictures in my office either."
Amelia came back to her office after her meeting with Alex.
She was not sure what had transpired. Alex did not come out
and say it but she detected some hints of his
dissatisfaction with what was happening with GLOBIS. There
was some mention of bringing in EDS or Andersen Consulting.
She did not really get a sense from him as to what exactly
he wanted her to do. Alex also mentioned that Bob Kingman
had confided in him that although the company seemed to be
doing well, John Admonson had decreed that they could do
better in controlling expenses and "do something about those
margins with the sub's." That meant the IFG should expect a
tighter budget for its projects and GLOBIS' share would be
no more than two-thirds of what was expected for the next
fiscal year when it was expected the system was to be
implemented.
Before the conclusion of the meeting, Alex brought up a new
subject. He said that John Mansfield had said repeatedly
that the General Ledger System that PVI had running on the
mini was so outdated that a new "Next Generation" system
would be needed soon. Furthermore, Alex quoted John as
saying "Why don't we take this opportunity to integrate the
Next Generation system with GLOBIS and at the same time
update our MRP system like
other companies of this size has done ten years ago." When
Amelia asked Alex what his read was on this, Alex said he
thought John was dead serious about what was said. Alex
wanted Amelia to prepare a response to this idea outlining
what role IFG would play in these projects.
When Amelia checked her voice mail messages, one was from
Andrew Moonhaus, VP of International Marketing. He wanted a
meeting with Amelia and Alex to talk about GLOBIS because he
had talked with Joanne Nelson and Bob Kingman and would like
to discuss his ideas as to what had to be in the database.
Another message Amelia received was from Annie Kevarian. She
called for an appointment to talk about interviewing for a
manager position in a product division that had recently
become open. The third message came from the country manager
of Belgium, she said that her accounting manager was being
investigated by the tax authorities because of questions
about how he reported his PVI stock options. Amelia
immediately called the corporate counsel for an appointment
to discuss this problem.
Six weeks later, PVI announced through its public affairs
office that it was putting forth an RFP for a global
information system which would serve them into the next
century (see Appendix B).The Company
The International Finance Group (IFG)
GLOBIS
Other Perspectives
Postscript
