Century Medical

Case Background

This case is about the development of new technology at Century Medical – a large medical products company based in Connecticut. For the past few years, the company had made significant progress by integrating technology into its systems and processes.

Sam Nolan is the Chief Information Officer at Century Medical. He has been working with Century Medical for the past 4 years. He has taken initiatives and led projects to design and implement various systems for Century Medical.

One of them was a benefits-administration system for the HR department of the company. The other was a web-based purchasing system that improved the purchasing of supplies and capital goods. These new systems automated the various office processes. This not only drastically reduced the time required to carry out the related tasks but also left the managers with more time so that they could concentrate on the value added activities. The projections showed that the system was to save Century Medical $2 million annually.

This technology upgrade was possible because Sam Nolan was successful in making the people in the company recognise the various benefits (like information and knowledge sharing, integrated business processes, better team co-ordination, etc) associated with the new technology.

Problem Identification

Sam Nolan had proposed a new web-based job posting system for the organisation. The idea was to ease the hiring of personnel from within the organisation. The system would link Century’s managers, recruiters and the job applicants. This would lead to a lot of savings in terms of recruiting and training cost. Sam Nolan also gathered a project team to develop the idea. Later the project got endorsed by the executive vice-president Sandra Ivey who gave Nolan the authorisation to go ahead with the project.

But then Sandra Ivey resigned and her replacement Tom Carr did not show much interest in the project. He was not a great technology enthusiast and considered Sam Nolan’s project a waste of time and money. He believed that something like recruitment that required people interactions had to be dealt with on a personal basis.

Tom Carr disapproved several new features that were suggested by the project team. He even barred the project team to gather inputs from the prospective users of the new system. This restriction had a potential of affecting the very design and quality of the system to be built.

This unsupportive behaviour of Tom Carr initiated the problems for Sam Nolan and his team.

Analysis

The case is an example of people’s unawareness about the role technology can play in today’s organisations. The case can be analysed by

 Analysing the various benefits of an advanced web-based system

 Balanced score card approach

System Benefits

The various benefits that a web-based system, like the one proposed by Sam Nolan, can bring to the organization are as under –

 Sam Nolan’s internal job posting system uses the intranet of the company with artificial intelligence software over it.

 The system would link managers, internal recruiters and job applicants via a common platform for information exchange.

 This would strengthen the internal coordination within the company.

 The system would also fasten and simplify the company’s recruitment procedure by allowing the existing employees of the organization to apply for newer vacancies in the company.

 Thus there would be a reduction in the recruitment and training expenses incurred by the organization.

 In the long run, the same system could be extended to the job applicants from outside the organization and thus help in the overall recruitment process.

Balanced