Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I talked to a friend the other night about how my last project encountered some problems and how the distributors were pretty enraged at the mess.  Also, I heard that another system had a major failure and that there was a nasty shouting match.  All of these areas stem from the disaster of a technology group on the Japan side.

My new company, which is in Japan, has problems but does not suffer the extreme dysfunctional issues of my previous company.  It's clear now that the issue at stake there is that particular part of the organization and how new leadership is called for.  My suggestion to my former employer to salvage the situation is one of two scenarios:

1) Fire 99% of the staff and return complete control to the US.
2) The company's Japan side needs to be acquired by another major finance firm and remove all vendors and most middle and senior management from the technology group.

Getting rid of the vendors completely is the first step the company needs.  Too much competition between vendors creates a major conflict in interest for the company.  Since the senior and middle management mostly know little to nothing about how a technology organization should be run, the vendors take advantage of the situation and try as much as possible to extract every little yen from the company.  Unfortunately, for the vendor staff, they too much suffer as they're forced to work in harsh conditions without compensation pay for the organization's incompetence in running projects.

Naturally, since the vendors run most of the systems, that leads to the problem of maintenance.  Most of the systems are trash to begin with and the only valuable pieces are the transactional and customer data.  Those systems need to be replaced regardless so they might as well build everything from scratch and just figure out how to migrate the data over to the new systems.

Next, most of the middle management staff needs to be fired.  They simply serve no purpose except as bottlenecks for getting real work done.  Having an administrative manager serves no real purpose for an organization that requires heavily technical people in charge.  The middle management there cannot help the people below them on critical issues.  They barely even push back requests from the business.

Many of the upper management people need to be cut off as well.  I'm not talking about the C*O level people (although I do think that a few need to be cut, but recently the right candidate was thankfully let go for doing a tremendously nightmarish job).  I'm talking about people with the title of assistant director or directors.  Again these are cases where people are getting gratuitous titles without having enough exposure to the insurance/technology side of business. 

The entire infrastructure team almost needs to be revamped.  There are perhaps two or three people that actually benefit the company, but the majority of the people there need to be sent packing.  That alone would improve productivity by 250%.

If I were to reorganize the company, after removing these leeches, my next plan of action would be to pay top dollar for the best IT staff I could find.  I would hire about 5-10 people on infrastructure with emphasis on security, servers, client desktop support, and server side software.  These people would know how to setup a completely scalable, failsafe infrastructure.  Next, I'd aim to get anywhere from 10-15 senior developers, not necessarily with financial backgrounds.  That's where your business analysts would help provide good specifications.  I'd also hire two top notch architects and one highly experienced director/CTO.  This combination would form the basis for the organization and I'd have a turn around time of one year for revamping 60% of the systems.  But instead of developing things just from specs or from the existing logic, I'd have a complete rehaul with almost all systems being built in house.

This is my suggestion for my former employer.  You need to start with the staff because without those people, you cannot execute any plan.  It's that simple.