Hafford furniture
A Crisis at Hafford Furniture: Cloud Computing Case study
MMBA 507
Student ID: 300333323
PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
Hafford Furniture was a furniture manufacturer since 1970, supplying to furniture retailers, wholesalers and occasionally one-time bulk purchasers across the United States.
Hafford relied on a Business Information System (BIS) to handle all the internal business processes. The BIS was seamlessly connected to a VAN-based EDI system, which served as the customer’s interface for making orders. In 2008, Hafford’s entire IT infrastructure and data storage were destroyed by a massive hurricane. Hafford was able to restore the company data with its disaster recovery plan, but not all its IT function.
In March 2009, VP of IT proposed in a management meeting to adopt SaaS cloud solution to restore the IT function. Hafford could access to the same BIS without having to worry about the cost to rebuild another IT data centre. He projected that the IT staff strength could be halved, as the cloud vendor would take care of the management of the software’s platform and its infrastructure. The next day, the president of Hafford ignored the internal decision-making protocol and contracted their disaster recovery vendor, PFI Services for that same cloud service.
In January 2010, Hafford was faced with appalling sales report for the year before, mostly caused by bottlenecks in the ordering system supported by PFI. Not only was the cloud capability insufficient, PFI was also filing for bankruptcy and undergoing liquidation. Hafford once again fell into a desperate situation.
REVIEW OF KEY ISSUES
Management issues
1. Lack of Corporate governance
The weak corporate governance in Hafford is especially notable in the fundamental change process. While there was an internal policy for creating a fundamental change in Hafford (Fig 1), Feckle, the President, had ignored it by entering into a cloud
MMBA 507
Student ID: 300333323
PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
Hafford Furniture was a furniture manufacturer since 1970, supplying to furniture retailers, wholesalers and occasionally one-time bulk purchasers across the United States.
Hafford relied on a Business Information System (BIS) to handle all the internal business processes. The BIS was seamlessly connected to a VAN-based EDI system, which served as the customer’s interface for making orders. In 2008, Hafford’s entire IT infrastructure and data storage were destroyed by a massive hurricane. Hafford was able to restore the company data with its disaster recovery plan, but not all its IT function.
In March 2009, VP of IT proposed in a management meeting to adopt SaaS cloud solution to restore the IT function. Hafford could access to the same BIS without having to worry about the cost to rebuild another IT data centre. He projected that the IT staff strength could be halved, as the cloud vendor would take care of the management of the software’s platform and its infrastructure. The next day, the president of Hafford ignored the internal decision-making protocol and contracted their disaster recovery vendor, PFI Services for that same cloud service.
In January 2010, Hafford was faced with appalling sales report for the year before, mostly caused by bottlenecks in the ordering system supported by PFI. Not only was the cloud capability insufficient, PFI was also filing for bankruptcy and undergoing liquidation. Hafford once again fell into a desperate situation.
REVIEW OF KEY ISSUES
Management issues
1. Lack of Corporate governance
The weak corporate governance in Hafford is especially notable in the fundamental change process. While there was an internal policy for creating a fundamental change in Hafford (Fig 1), Feckle, the President, had ignored it by entering into a cloud
References: Levine, Keith, and Bruce A. White. "A Crisis at Hafford Furniture: Cloud Computing Case Study." Cases on Emerging Information Technology Research and Applications (2013): 70. Armbrust, Michael, et al. "A view of cloud computing." Communications of the ACM 53.4 (2010): 50-58. Grossman, R. L. (2009). The case for cloud computing. IT professional, 11(2), 23-27.