Margret pulled up Kent’s calendar and looked at the last three weeks. What an MBA, she thought. He had studiously filled his calendar with bullshit entries leaving only fifteen minutes open here and there. Margret was all too familiar with this tactic. To seem important you had to “look” busy and make it difficult for people to have meetings with you. This made the higher-ups think you were slaving away for the company.
What Kent was really doing was spending the day surfing the Web. Margret knew this because she had run the IP usage report for Kent’s machine. Now that the little bastard had figured out how to get on to the Internet and run a mouse, he did absolutely nothing. He even surfed the Web from home using the company’s VPN! The higher-ups never saw the IP usage report. They would only request reports about the amount of time people spent logged in and active, not reports about what they were actively doing. This man had turned doing nothing into an art form. Now, he dropped the project which was going to get him his promotion onto her back along with everything else of his she was doing.
Traveling around the world to visit each existing data center and programming staff was probably an easy sell for him. Most likely he pitched it as “doing the legwork to ensure a smooth migration.” What he was really doing was taking a company-paid four-week vacation. He would meet with each data center manager and each development manager to discuss their needs, then they would all be compelled to take him out for entertainment. He would be traveling to four different countries and taking in the sights while there.
Every one of those IT teams reported to Margret, not Kent. She could have easily prepared the report on whom they could eliminate after each migration. Every one of those banks had its own IT culture. It was incredibly difficult to impose the processes and controls used by the original bank. You could try the pitch that if their IT processes had been better they wouldn’t have been eaten, but that argument was hollow. Had upper management not been so damned greedy and gone so far out on a limb with options and their derivatives, the banks wouldn’t have gone under; everybody knew it.
On the right side of Margret’s desk was a pile of paper with programming requests from all of the different branches. On the left side was a pile of paper, mostly from the board, screaming about getting a single view of the company for ease of planning and financial reporting. Margret knew this entire data center migration thing was a lark. It had been a lark when Kent’s predecessor started it, but the only experience the guy had was in data center consolidation and the board was looking for a quick win at cutting costs.
Had Kent’s predecessor even bothered to read her integration plan, they would have been down to one set of data centers now. All they had to do was train each of the branch locations on how to use the existing system, then migrate the data into the existing systems. There was only a handful of additional fields in use by the banks that had been conquered. Had they started and used quality consultants, they would be done. All of the extra data centers would have been permanently eliminated, along with the programming staff from the conquered banks. Cost savings would be in the millions and the board would have been able to get a single picture of how the bank was doing. Now the programmers at each location were busily making changes that weren’t supported by the central bank systems just to try to hang onto their jobs. Almost no documentation existed for these changes. Migration was going to be a real PITA (Pain In The Ass).
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