Case Study
Case Study A: Business and Technology Transformation in Utilities
In 1994, the management of a leading water service company in the United Kingdom looked to business and technology transformation to explore new ways of working with new customers and to provide greater commercial focus, flexibility, and growth. The motivation for this was provided by the global financial crisis and tighter regulatory price control. As with other transformations, “there are patterns of sequence such as crisis, exploration, awakening, followed by visioning and engagement with the organization” (Ruddle, [ 23] , p. 138).
The transformation resulted in fundamental shifts in processes, behaviors, ways of working, and the enabling mechanisms of the organization. The change took more than three years and demonstrated both emergent and intentional change as it evolved. Contextual issues like politics, governance, and organizational structure influenced success at a number of points. The leadership team remained largely unchanged. The members’ experience was limited to single large projects but not of such a massive complex scale. The resulting leadership style “meant more emphasis on factors such as vision, coaching, empowering the front line to lead change, balancing change co‐ordination and control with local ownership, and use of balanced scorecards” (Ruddle, [ 23] , p. 139).
The leaders faced dissatisfaction in the workforce and lack of consistent ownership and values across the company. Early involvement of all stakeholders and consistent and continuous communication were the keys to success for the initiative. Ruddle ([ 23] ) summarized the factors influencing the successful transformation at the company as follows:
Establishing a business case for readiness to change;
Having a clear, well‐articulated, and owned strategic intent and vision;
Energetic, involved, and visionary leadership demonstrated in the top team;
Focusing on customer propositions and the core processes and capabilities to deliver them;
Ownership of the values outlined throughout the organization;
Alignment of the enabling factors, particularly reward, performance, and structural mechanisms;
Change style that used high‐level outcomes across a spectrum of balanced measures; and
Exploring and experimenting with new ways of working to shape intent for success of the program.
Case Study B: Market‐Driven Technology Transformation in Health Care
HCA, one of the world's leading health care facilities operators, embarked on multiple initiatives over a period of years to deploy technology solutions to improve health care. Significant projects included establishing a clinical data warehouse and a big data resource to support predictive modeling. The organization's leaders also aimed to leverage “size and scale to drive cost efficiencies, using our multi‐market positions to test new and innovative ideas, using our collective operating intellect to drive best clinical and management practices across the enterprise” (McKinsey, [ 16] ). They implemented strategic pilot initiatives to ensure people closest to execution could provide input and solutions based on their collective experience to ensure effective skills transfer and planning. Specialists met with staff to mentor them and transfer knowledge and staff were trained in proven best‐practice processes.
The significant leadership characteristics identified from this case study are:
Identification of improvement opportunities. Leadership recognized the opportunities in the industry.
Rightsizing. The right team, with the right skills was in place to execute the plan with the abilities to adapt appropriately, when circumstances changed.
Detailed plan. A clear and detailed operating plan was in place with appropriate metrics and checkpoints (balancing both short‐term and long‐term goals) and was communicated across the organization.
Alignment of technology with business. The operations team was made an integral part of strategic planning and development.
CEO's regular interaction with employees. Relationships with people across all levels ensured better buy‐in of a new initiative.
Case Study C: Industry‐Focused Technology Transformation in Financial Services
As in other parts of the world, the banking sector in India strongly emphasizes technology and innovation. Initially used to provide support for internal requirements pertaining to bookkeeping and transactions processing, technology soon enabled banks to provide better quality services at greater speed. Internet banking and mobile banking made it possible for customers to access banking services from anywhere at any time.
The banking sector is an example in which IT infrastructures have had implications for economic development. A customer is now empowered to choose a service from a range of providers. Customers are increasingly individualistic and choosy and have started to demand transactions on their own terms. The predicted entry of nonbanks in retail banking has made this scenario even more competitive (Padmanabhan, [ 21] ).
The significant leadership characteristics identified from this case study are:
Planning for increasing customer‐centric products and intensifying competition. This may also imply a change in strategy for marketing high‐technology products that result in a probable change in mission and vision in some cases.
Achieving a balance among people, process, and technology involved in the transformation. “This may also mean that you have to press the pause button while engaging the top management once in a while, for effectively bridging gaps between the IT and business teams,” said G. Padmanabhan, executive director of Reserve Bank of India, at a conference of the Institute for Development & Research in Banking Technology in Hyderabad (Padmanabhan, [ 21] ). The support of top management for IT was crucial.
Technological transformation leaders drive the scientific and technological innovation processes in high‐technology industries to improve operations by innovation. The entire organization gets involved in the innovation process and is aligned with the organization's strategy.
Case Study D: Postmerger Technology Transformation in the Technology Sector
Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC operations implied a technology transformation to support the new operating model, spread across 160 countries, and the need for standardization of operations. Legacy IT systems were replaced by a global enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to standardize processes while remaining receptive to local variations and statutory requirements (McKinsey, [15] ).
The PC market has traditionally had a very thin profit margin. The new IT solutions were needed to enable the company's global operating model with new business capabilities and support the newly diversified customer base and global back‐end operations. There was a clear need to link business strategy with the IT transformation road map. Rather than outsourcing, the focus was on building an internal team. The major releases of the new system were delivered on schedule and on budget. Standardized global operations for finance and the supply chain were launched and migrated to all strategic platforms. Overall, IT spending as a percentage of revenue dropped from 2.8 percent in 2008 to 1.3 to 1.4 percent in 2010 because of the initiative.
The significant leadership characteristics identified from this case study are:
Because it had a globally dispersed and transformation inexperienced team, the people strategy was to gradually build the internal IT team. Culture integration was critical. According to the company's vice president of human resources, “It's not about what Lenovo used to do or what IBM used to do, but rather what we want to do together, combining the best of both organizations” (Tang, [ 24] , p. 43).
IT‐business alignment was important, as was understanding that not all business requirements can be accommodated. The initial focus was on delivery of functionalities that are critical to business operations; fancy features/enhancements were secondary.
Supportive leadership from the very beginning was key to success.
Robust monitoring and continuous impact assessment led to resource coordination and benefits realization. The responsibility and scope of the ERP implementation project was clearly defined and controlled. The project team was balanced between IT professionals and end users.
Change champions/agents were deployed who consistently advocated the benefits of ERP systems to engender commitment.
There was a clear understanding of the business model, as well as a deep understanding of the legacy systems that were being phased out.
Case Study E: ERP‐Enabled Business Transformation in Manufacturing
To support its newly developed centralized supply chain and year 2000–compliant general ledger system, a supplier of wiring harnesses for the automotive industry with facilities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada embarked on a plan to implement ERP.
A team‐approach was followed that eventually received consensus to proceed at a corporate level. A learning environment was established based on appropriately responding to technological changes or learning from other organizations that had achieved best practices in the industry (Motwani, Subramanian, & Gopalakrishna, [ 18] ). The significant leadership characteristics identified from this case study are:
Communication was open, leading to information sharing, cross‐functional training, and personnel movement within the organization. Use of external information included employees, consultants, and customers.
Three crucial teams were deployed to ensure successful implementation: a strategic thinking team, a functional consultant/business analyst team, and an operations team.
Leaders worked very closely with the ERP vendor during the implementation process with appropriate process metrics.
Leaders had accepted that there would be glitches and did not point fingers when they occurred; instead, lessons‐learned documents were compiled to avoid repetition of mistakes.
Managers were able to take all employees in their fold. Thus, they willingly went the extra mile to support the project. Change champions were deployed for change advocacy.