Topic Teasers Vol. 86: The Failure Repository

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  Business Intelligence   Information Technology   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Manufacturing   Strategy  

I’m not in IT, but I’m heading a project to implement one of those big name software packages that is supposed to place all the corporate information in one application. We’ve rolled it out, but as a 24-hour organization it seems that we have departments unable to access their information at all hours of the day and night. Our vendor is on call for the fixes, but the outages interrupt our business. I’m discouraged, angry and exhausted. How do I manage these issues?

A. With a big name supplier, the responsibility to keep things up and going is on their shoulders, not yours. Contact upper management and ask to have any payments to them stopped until all areas of your organization are up and running with no down time for at least six weeks.

B. Each department was probably given a chance to express what connectivity they needed before the customization of this overriding package was finalized. Get the name of each person who was part of the planning team and subsequently had an outage in their area and report them to their own manager.

C. Ask your own IT team to get involved in solving these issues. Obviously, the vendor does not have competent people on its staff who can manage an install like yours. If your own …

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