Breezy Services Company, a medium-sized service provider, was in trouble.1 New entrants threatened its domination of particular market segments, and competitors attacked its customer base. Its business practices and information systems infrastructure were decades old, and there was little hope of enhancing the company’s existing (or legacy) systems to support innovative products or services. And, although the company was still viable, its profit margins were shrinking.
Breezy’s top management decided to undertake a massive three-year business reengineering effort that would involve all business functions and include an extensive information systems (IS) project to technologically enable radical business change. Breezy executives expected the project to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvement in both operations and customer service. After initial analysis, selected business managers organized into teams structured around a newly defined reengineered business model.
IS also mobilized to support the business reengineering effort. After Breezy hired a new CIO from an external pool of candidates (and removed the incumbent CIO from the IS operations), the IS staff thoroughly assessed the company’s existing systems and IS employees’ skills and reorganized to focus on new technologies and operate parallel to the business reengineering teams. The department also introduced a new system development methodology and developed prototype systems to support business reengineering efforts using client/server technologies. Finally, the IS staff began to develop a comprehensive, long-term IT strategy designed to... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this and all MIT Sloan Managmeent Review articles.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article in PDF form.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this article and the entire archive of MIT SMR articles.
Upgrade your existing subscription to premium
Sign in if you are a premium subscriber.
Do you subscribe the MIT Sloan Management Review in print? Enter the email address and password you used when ordering. Don't remember? Lookup your subscription account information
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription give you access to the entire archive of articles.
