blog It hasn’t precisely been the smoothest few months inside the IT department of logistics giant Toll. Regular readers will recall that the company dumped its IT outsourcing plans in October last year following an examination of the proposal that had found its projected business benefits as being “lower than expected”. Shortly afterwards, Toll lost its chief information officer, respected IT executive John Ansley.
Late last week came further news of disruption inside the business. iTnews reported (we recommend you click here for the full article) that Toll has stopped the rollout of a Google Apps deployment to its staff and is developing a new plan for its proposed SAP-based finance transformation. The media outlet reported with respect to Toll’s SAP plans (we recommend you click here for the full article):
“… it was found the solution did not entirely meet the business requirements … Toll temporarily halted the rollout to address the issue and stood SAP’s team down in December”
To my mind, what we are seeing within Toll right now is nothing short of chaos and dysfunction — the worst possible situation with respect to a major company’s IT department. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone competent working there at this point, and would advise them to prepare for years more chaos in the immediate future. You simply cannot pause and cancel major IT projects like this within major organisations. The consequences down the track for Toll will be profound — and profoundly bad.
After all, there would have been strong business reasons that these major IT projects were kicked off in the first place. Cancelling or pausing them will only ensure that those business needs will continue to go unmet.
Image credit: Toll, Creative Commons
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So why do so many Toll IT employees continue stay with the company despite the appalling way we’ve been treated over the past 22 months? Fact is, there are not too many IT shops of this size in the outer south-east of Melbourne. So for many, it’s convenient – close to home. Others are simply biding their time until the right opportunity comes up to move on.
Everyone else is just waiting for Japan Post to step in and drive Toll’s future direction.
Time to go a very toxic place to work. A lot of duplication, far too many opinions, no leadership and utter chaos.
5-6 CIOs or whatever they call themselves. Only one of them resembles anything close to an executive. No recognition for real talent and leadership, what a joke!
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