Troubleshooting assignments are quite often fairly hush-hush but there are some that I don’t talk about because nobody would believe me if I did. For example, Santa’s ERP implementation.
Everyone here at the North Pole is very, very excited by this and we confidently expect to be handling most “Dear Father Christmas” mail online by 2015. The Venture Capitalists are all over this one like a bad rash.
Forget FaceBook and Twitter, this one will be really humungous.
Sure we have had some teething problems. You would expect it with any major implementation. Apparently the ERP system wasn’t designed for five hundred million transactions for a single night and even minor upgrades are a nightmare.
That’s the trouble when you go 24×7 – no maintenance window you see – in the old days, with the manual system, we could always catch up with the paperwork in January and February. These days it just has to be done in real time.
Which is probably why Santa’s last performance review was a bit dicey, because some of the institutional shareholders got wind of the e-business problems.
It’s amazing how many IT projects get clearer focus when the share price starts to be affected.
That’s where I came in – to make sure that everything would be “business as usual” on Christmas Eve. Thanks Santa.
Fair enough, we Interims do sell ourselves on our trouble-shooting skills so no time for whingeing; get on with the job, first task: assess the situation and prioritise the “must-do-nows.”
Easier said than done when you are trying to decide the relative importance of the GPS Reindeer Guidance System and the Order Entry Chimney Interface.
Now I’m a reasonable man, but I’d really like to get my hands on the salesman who sold the CRM system to Santa.
Our marketing elves have been tearing their hair out for the past nine months trying to update the Customer database. Apparently the system won’t accept “no longer believes” as a valid reason for losing a customer – so we just don’t know how to manage the customer update process for thousands and thousands of kids.
It doesn’t help either, if your customer is still expecting the full mince-pie and sherry treatment, when these days we can only deliver the “no-frills” (dump-it-and-go) service.
Thankfully, I got here just in time to stop the new website going live prematurely. It was supposed to be a “limited” pilot – just a few pages of html, nothing behind it, you know the sort of thing.
Too true, I know the sort of thing. The me-too dot com disaster sort of thing.
It’s all very well being all gung-ho about e-business but it takes more than a few fancy web pages to make a business.
If traditional retailing is all about location, location, location; e-business is all about fulfilment, fulfilment, fulfilment – we ignore this rule at our peril.
Yes, it is easy to get “something” up and running on the web very quickly these days. But if you haven’t got rock-solid fulfilment processes in place, you are going to repent at leisure as your business fails.
Unfortunately though, it’s not just the challenge of integrating our legacy and e-systems that’s keeping me awake at nights.
We have serious problems with the Data Protection people because it seems that every time some innocent in Europe sends us an e-mail, or tosses their Christmas wishlist up the chimney, we are deemed to be exporting personal data outside of the European Union.
This is a nightmare, as most of this data is unsolicited in the first place. I have tried to explain this to Brussels but they just don’t want to understand and there is no such thing as Safe Harbor in this neck of the tundra.
The internal inquiry into the leaking of millions of Christmas gift lists, by a disgruntled Elf DBA, has not helped our public relations at a sensitive time.
So, as Christmas Eve draws closer, my sleep becomes more and more restless… during the long winter nights I have desperately tried to remember the original head-hunter’s call…I could have sworn he said something about lapdancers, but I suppose it must have been Laplanders… Better get my hearing checked before I am dropped in it again.
Mind you every assignment has its lighter moments and this is no exception. On a clear day we can see Sarah Palin’s backyard from here and Santa always takes great comfort from the probability that more people believe in him…
Merry Christmas everyone and if you don’t get the presents you hope for, please don’t blame me. You should call our Customer Service Centre – it’s open 48 hours a day, just holler up the nearest chimney.
