A newly hired CIO arrived at a $500-million consumer products company. He was surprised by what he found. “There wasn’t a standard way of evaluating and approving and managing technology,” recalls Tres Roeder, project management author, speaker, and consultant, who worked with that new CIO.
The CIO set out to do the logical thing: Evaluate the various tools for serving the business units’ needs, select the best, most robust, and most secure of them, and then standardize on those across the company. There was only one problem — the business units refused to comply. “The individual business unit heads did not want to give up the control that they had,” Roeder says. “They could pick the project management tool they wanted or the document repository they wanted. They didn’t want the CIO telling them what they could and couldn’t do.”