If Nader, TH, or even Ray reads this post-I know that many of these posts are terrible-but personally I want to say I just want to URGE you to please, please PLEASE take a closer look at who is reporting to you. Are they accountable to anyone? Have you personally sat them down or better yet-their PEOPLE and asked questions about what can be improved? WE ARE DESPERATE for TRUE leadership-I can't speak for everyone and I am sure many will disagree or call me an "a-- kisser" but I sincerely need to express the TRUE need for connection between departments that work together. NO ONE COMMUNICATES. Nader-you send out emails about how we have customer wins, sales wins, which is great-but what about the infrastructure and people needed to support all this growth? How are we supposed to do it with substandard systems and complete lack of staff. I implore you kindly to look into this. Everyone is tired of reading LONG emails about success of sales and other outward facing items when we, the people on the inside are the ones making it happen each day on a shoestring. Maybe you are looking into it, if so, your managers are not telling us anything.
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Hey, Nader, care to comment about Follett's tendency to eliminate positions and lay off long term employees only to have the position (or a very similar new position) magically reappear 6 months later? I see a pattern. I wonder if EEOC will too.
I have noticed a pattern at FSS. Layoff long term employees (throw in a few younger ones during each layoff to hide what is happening), wait 6 months, post the job and hire new lower cost employee. Hmmm, wonder how the EEOC will feel about that.
There are reasons why companies outside of Follett are successful...Look at top leaders at Google, Amazon, and many others- leadership- they KNOW the issues and address them directly. Unfortunately the EMT for FSS by and large push paper, leave early and push down very little usable info. Want a better company? Empowered employees would be a good start
Exactly! That is why every application when deployed goes through huge changes once the end users start using it.
It is not an IT thing (maybe little when bad code is delivered) but a SME thing.
don't blame IT for the problems. blame the person giving them requirements. you will find those are the folks that don't know what their doing. we just build what we are told. you question the requirements, you are told you don't know the customer and to be like nike... just do it.
You make it sound like there are so many great ideas and projects that need to be implemented. I am not aware of anything. Upgrade eCommerce - thats a game changer. If there was a single great idea, the company does get behind, but there are none.
Agree with original post but also think it will take a combination....IT...plus communication ACROSS the ENTIRE organization about priorities, issues and where each project ranks. These leaders need to come together and make this plain-look back at Ray's "goals" and compare them to Nader's...tell US How they will work TOGETHER and where we fit in- and...when to expect each milestone.
IT catches the blame for everything. New systems are implemented with cross fuctional project teams. It is a project team failure, not an IT only failure. Sh-- - half the time the business picks an application that could never succeed in its intended role. Just look at Retalon.
Systems will not solve Follett problems, wish it was that easy. Changing industry, employees with morale issues, tough financials etc. What is Follett's value proposition?
This is a good post and very true. We are asked to give the customer the best experience and increase revenue while lowering expenses yet our systems are horrible enough hat it takes more manual intervention than a manual process would take.
IT never delivers a full project on time and we have to accept mediocre crap that barely gets us by.
We need a change.