Background
The largest privately owned pet publisher in the country, with $90 million in annual sales and four decades of operation. Roughly 15 years earlier, the owner had hired a programmer to build the company's publishing, sales, and production systems — that programmer eventually became Chief Technology Officer and came to control every aspect of IT.
Situation
By 2005, leadership had reached a breaking point with the CTO's performance and control over the company. He admitted he wasn't interested in managing IT — "I just want to program" — but pushed out every IT Director or consultant management tried to bring in. A new Publishing Enterprise System he began building in .NET sat incomplete by fall 2005, support was effectively nonexistent, and network and development managers blamed each other for failures with no accountability in sight.
Solution
Management hired Crossturn Consulting Group to evaluate, reorganize, and re-staff the IT organization around customer service and business expectations, and to lead the search for a new enterprise system.
Results
We completed the project in 6 months. A new IT Director was hired at the end of that period, with only two people let go during the process. The remaining team was retrained on new policies and procedures, users saw a real change in service within 45 days, budgets were established, infighting disappeared, systems stabilized, and new technologies were introduced — with the new ERP project handed off to the incoming IT Director.
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