October 04, 2006, 2:17 PM — Saddled with an outdated IT organization that simply wasn't up to the task of positioning the company for future growth, Farm Credit Canada appointed a new CIO and began the difficult task of completely transforming IT. FCC is now well on its way to becoming a truly process-centric organization with a service oriented architecture to support it. Here's how they did it.
The story was a common one lack of system and data integration, cumbersome business processes, long waits to get IT to make even simple changes, and low IT morale -- but what happened at Farm Credit Canada (FCC) is rare and unusual.
Today, IT at FCC has been transformed and the company is well on the way to becoming a truly process-centric organization with a service oriented architecture (SOA) to support it. Morale has hit an all-time high and user satisfaction with IT is higher than it's ever been, according to CIO, Paul MacDonald.
"Making these changes was not rocket science, but it did take guts," admitted MacDonald, a former FCC business executive who volunteered to take on this challenge. "We were in serious turmoil in IT for about two to three months," he stated. "At times, it felt like those around me were expecting us to fail. Fortunately, FCC people are very good at collaboration and we were able to achieve a positive outcome together."
Beginning the journey
The company's journey began in January 2004 when CEO, John Ryan, launched an Enterprise Integration Program (EIP) designed to transform the company and address the key inhibitors to its future growth. These inhibitors included: a systems-driven approach to process design resulting in cumbersome processes that worked around systems' functionality; lack of enterprise-wide integration, both across the customer value chain and at different levels; and the need to streamline processes to redirect work toward higher value-add activities.
The leaders of the EIP soon realized a few hard truths. They discovered that enterprise integration was a business problem, not an IT one. In fact, they learned they needed to better understand FCC's entire enterprise value chain and related business processes before effective system and data integration could be achieved. Although there were many problems with IT that inhibited integration, these would never be solved, they recognized, until the business understood its own processes and put proper process governance in place. Only after this happened would it be possible to put the technology in place to enable those processes.
