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When managers at the City Utilities of Springfield in Missouri gave Pam Armstrong the job of senior manager of IT, they told her what they considered to be the $229 million utility's biggest problem: Its enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, begun two years earlier, was still floundering.
Pam Armstrong of City Utilities of Springfield
Her recommendation: Hire a project manager for the ERP task so Armstrong could focus on changing the way the IT department operates.
"It was a real gutsy move," says Kelly Laurie, director of IT Business Consulting, a new division that Armstrong created. But her assessment was on target, he says. The ERP task was difficult "because we were traditionally a mainframe coding shop and we were struggling, trying to do the custom coding for a package system," Laurie says.
Drawing on resources she had developed in her previous position as director of employee development and safety at the utility, Armstrong, 41, got the IT staff some much-needed training, prioritized "what was wanted and what was needed," and hired an experienced project manager. "We finished the installation in the next nine to 12 months," she says.
To assess the more far-reaching problems, Armstrong began with "lots of hands-on interviews," she says.
Armstrong found that the 63-member IT staff, which supports the utility's 950 employees, had no standardized operational processes. Moreover, it didn't understand the business, and the business side didn't understand IT's role. Communication, even within IT itself, was poor, and morale was low, she says.
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