Discuss what went wrong at Genericorp in developing the EIS? What mistakes were made?
In developing the EIS, the first thing any company needs to determine is if the business is ready for the EIS. In Genericorp, Perry wanted EIS because he wanted to improve the image of IS department. With that sole objective, failure of EIS was inevitable. As well know, organizational pain is a very important factor in implementing the EIS in an organization. There is a high possibility of EIS failure if the system is implemented without necessity because without necessity companies are reluctant in keeping up with the maintenance, updates, and improvement of the system. Like in Genericorp, if top management regards EIS as a “nice to have” rather than a requirement to compete, EIS funding will be at the bottom of the priority list in difficult financial period.
Similarly, an alignment between business and IT strategy is crucial. EIS is implemented to support the business planning. If IT staffs are unclear about business strategy and what executives are looking for, EIS will fail to meet the executives’ expectation and will be of little help in formulating business strategy. In Genericorp, IT staffs had hard time arranging meetings with executives. IT personnel had to collect data from the wrong sources; the executives’ staff and secretaries. Executive didn’t get what they were looking for because they failed to communicate what they wanted. This is the main reason for failure of the EIS at Genericorp.
At last, skilled and experienced personnel are important for the continuous improvements of and adjustment to the EIS. Bringing new IT staff periodically, like Genericorp did, is very unproductive because new staffs will require considerable amount of time to understand the system before they can make improvement to the ESI. Thus, these are the few mistakes of Genericorp in implementing the