Sam Nolan clicked the mouse for one more round of solitaire onthe computer in his den. He’d been at it for more than an hour, andhis wife had long ago given up trying to persuade him to join herfor a movie or are Saturday night on the town. The mind-numberinggame seemed to be all that calmed Sam down enough to stop thinkingabout work and how his job seemed to get worse every day.

Nolan was chief information officer at Century Medical, a largemedical products company based in Connecticut. He had joined thecompany four years ago, and since that time Century had made greatprogress integrating technology into its systems and processes.Nolan had already led projects to design and build two highlysuccessful systems for century. One was a benefits-administrationsystem for the company’s HR department. The other was a complexWeb-based purchasing system that stream-lined the process ofpurchasing supplies and capital goods. Although the system had beenup and running for only a few months, modest projects were that itwould save Century nearly $2 million annually. Previously,Century’s purchasing managers were bogged down with shuffling andprocessing paper. The purchasing process would begin when anemployee filled out a materials request form. Then the form wouldtravel through various offices for approval and signatures beforeeventually being converted into a purchase order. The new web-basedsystem allowed employees to fill out electronic request forms thatwere automatically e-mailed to everyone whose approval was needed.The time for processing request forms was cut from weeks to days oreven hours. When authorization was complete, the system wouldautomatically launch a purchase order to the appropriate supplier.In addition, because the new system had dramatically cut the timepurchasing managers spent shuffling paper, they now had more timeto work collaboratively with key stakeholders to identify andselect the best suppliers and negotiate better deals.

Nolan thought wearily of all the hours he had put in developingtrust with people throughout the company and showing them howtechnology could not only save time and money but also supportteam-based work and give people more control over their own jobs.He smiled briefly she recalled one long-term HR employee,61-year-old Ethel Morre. She had been terrified when Nolan firstbegan showing her the company’s intranet, but she was now one ofhis biggest supporters. In fact, it had been Ethel who had firstapproached him with idea about a web-based job posting system. Thetwo had pulled together a team and developed an idea for linkingcentury managers, internal recruiters, and job applicants usingartificial intelligence software on top of an integrated web-basedsystem. When Nolan had presented the idea to his boss, executivevice-president Sandra Ivey, she had enthusiastically endorsed it,and within a few weeks the team had authorization to proceed withthe project.

But everything began to change when Ivey resigned her positionsix months later to take a plum job in New York. Ivey’s successor,Tom carr, seemed to have little interest in the project. Duringtheir first meeting, Carr had openly referred to the project as awaste of time and money. He immediately disapproved several newfeatures suggested by the company’s internal recruiters, eventhough the project team argued that the features could doubleinternal hiring and save millions in training costs. “Just stick tothe original plan and get it done. All this stuff needs to behandled on a personal basis anyway,” Carr countered. “you can’tlearn more from a computer than you can talking to real people –and as for internal recruiting, it shouldn’t be so hard to talk topeople if they’re already working right here in the company.” Carrseemed to have no understanding of how and why technology was beingused. He became irritated when Ethel Moore referred to the systemas “web-based”. He boasted that he had never visited Century’sintranet site and suggested that “this internet fad” would blowover in a year or so anyway. Even Ethel’s enthusiasm couldn’t getthrough to him. She tried to show him some of the HR resourcesvisible on the intranet and explain how it had benefited thedepartment and the company, but he waved her away. “Technology isfor those people in the IS department. My job is people, and yoursshould be, too”. Ethel was crushed, and Nolan realized it would belike beating his head against a brick wall to try to persuade Carrto the team’s point of view. Near the end of the meeting, Carr evenjokingly suggested that the project team should just buy a coupleof filing cabinets and save everyone some time and money.

Just when the team thought things couldn’t get any worse, Carrdropped the other bomb. They would no longer be allowed to gatherinput from uses of the new system. Nolan feared that without theinput of potential users, the system wouldn’t meet their needs, oreven that users would boycott the system because they hadn’t beenallowed to participate. No doubt that would put a great big “I toldyou so” smile right on Carr’s face.

Nolan sighed and leaned back in his chair. The project had begunto feel like joke. The vibrant and innovative human resourcesdepartment his team had imagined now seemed like nothing more thana pipe dream. But despite his frustration, a new thought enteredNolan’s mind: “Is Carr just stubborn and narrow-minded or does hehave a point that HR is a people business that doesn’t need ahigh-tech job posting system?”

questions:

1. Need to develop some alternatives to Address theProblem Statement
2. Then we need to evaluate the alternatives, thenrecommend One
3. Find a plane for the alternative wechoose.
4. Evaluation of Chosen Alternative ForEffectiveness