Merry TrentiMIS

Today marks our organization’s first anniversary of deploying the iMIS product as our billing and receipting application. This year after the release has been trying for many of our IT staff. As a solution provider, we strive to separate problem from solution, and deliver a solution that increases operational efficiencies, meets regulatory needs, and is at a minimum better than the old solution.

Well depending on whom you ask, the solution did not meet the minimum requirements for success.

From an IT organization we were able to decommission the final application running on big iron. We consolidated our SAN, improved our disaster recovery story, reduced maintenance expenses and significantly decreased the need for a big iron operator to be involved in the actual execution of many processes.

Our reports went from daily printouts to self-service reports, drill through capabilities and report history no longer involved paper.

Our bills went from something that looked like it came off of a dot-matrix printer in some sort of cipher code, to a nice professionally done invoice. We even had a usability team involved in the design of the invoice.

We could actually track the history of an account through the system on a single page view and no longer only had the most recent information available.

Finance was ecstatic, because for the first time the way we receipted money into accounts followed GAAP.

But not all was well.

As it turns out we had such a simple way of doing things in the past that moving to a proper way of doing things caused such chaos that it seemed for some that we had indeed moved backwards.

IT spent nearly 6 months post release “cleaning” up the best we could to prepare the business for what they need to do to accommodate the changes in the system. Now in all fairness there has been some significant turnover in key areas, but when the new people are asked how they would change it, they wouldn’t.

Today we celebrated Trent and iMIS. Trent is just one developer. He is part of a larger team who has been working together to help an organization adapt to the “right” ways to do things. We had been so mired in keeping things “right” that we didn’t stop to realize that doing things properly was going to be such a burden on the organization.

I can’t address the business issues right now, but I can do a little something for the development team, business analyst team, QA, and the rest of our IT staff.

We had dilly bars, played Guitar Hero III, put up signs celebrating TrentiMIS, and even went so far as to have an inflatable penguin with a sign “Merry TrentiMIS”.

This organizational change stuff is hard, and it’s even harder when you don’t accurately predict the organizational impact to a major system replacement. I’m not sure you can ever understand the true impact of the change, but we can do our best and manage instead of react.

Now back to my Guitar Hero, I need to take Trent down.

Merry TrentiMIS!