Witness Peter Weis, vice president and CIO of Matson Navigation. He has 25 years of IT and business experience, specializing in transportation, logistics and supply chain management. He earned an undergraduate degree in business from Berkeley and an MBA from Wharton. He started out in applications development and got his first management gig at 26. After his biggest assignment--six years as CIO of APL Logistics where executives "demanded transformation on impossible deadlines"--he figured he'd seen and done it in all in corporate IT and switched to product development at a software-as-a-service start-up. So when the president of Matson approached him to transform the company's IT from a back-office service provider into a business partner, Weis balked. "I wasn't convinced they were serious about driving change," he says
Wrong. The turnaround required new application and infrastructure strategy, creating IT governance processes, overhauling skill sets and repairing business relations. The overhaul is well underway, and Weis involves his top performers so they can pick up the turnaround experience that will be vital in their future leadership roles.
He charged Srini Cherukuri, Matson's senior director of IT operations, for example, with addressing persistent performance problems with some mission-critical software. The custom application was a quasi-ERP system for one business unit that replaced an ancient system that employees used for years. "Tap, tap, tap, a few fields at a time, they could fill the green screen with their eyes closed," Cherukuri explains. The new browser-based software was more complex. The old system ran like clockwork across the network. Response times for the graphics-rich replacement were slower.
Instead of just addressing the technical issues, Cherukuri--who started out as a developer--approached the situation as an opportunity to rethink Matson's software development processes. The goal was to put the business and the users first. He gathered a team of system architects and developers to figure out what was plaguing not just performance but user adoption rates and incorporated the lessons learned and solutions into Matson's software development lifecycle management methodology. "The biggest thing we learned was that you have to go back and look at the whole process and address right from the beginning where the users are coming from," Cherukuri says. "That is now baked into every new project." He also introduced new tools to address performance issues long before the QA period. Developing these new software processes took about four months, says Cherukuri; institutionalizing the changes is still going on. And response times and adoption rates of the redesigned system that started it all have surged.
Weis treats his team's turnaround and transformation projects like any other, subjecting them to formal IT governance, including strategic planning, budgeting and regular reviews that Weis calls "CIO deep dives." With turnarounds, the business always wants quick results and these IT methodologies ensure IT takes enough time to fundamentally fix a problem. "You didn't create it in a day," Weis says. "And you can't fix it in a day. I put the building blocks in place and allow my team to execute."