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Organisational context: IT culture in X

'And from early days it was clear that X didn't have an IT strategy ... to handle that [Multinational] business more efficiently. The mainframe systems for example that were used in the UK were not particularly user friendly towards Multinational business, couldn't cope with currencies ... . The level of MIS was wholly inadequate to provide us with meaningful analysis ... and the accounting side ... was something of a shambles and things had to be forced into UK systems ... and we had no clout to try and change any of these systems because we were just a small tail trying to wag a very very big dog. We had attempted that in the UK two or three years previously when we spent the best part of a year looking at developing systems specifically for Multinational but ... we were being funnelled back into: this is the only way we can handle this in the UK, and we might be able to provide you with extra screens to fit on the end of the UK system, but to build anything else .. and I think by the time that the plug was pulled on that we'd probably already spent the best part of a million quid looking at it and incidently going nowhere in the sense of the objectives we'd set ourselves ... And that was chopped mainly, well there was a new era came onto IT project areas in the UK, and when people sat down and did a cost benefit analysis all of the benefit was in quality, efficiency, speed of delivery, accuracy which we basically couldn't quantify, so we didn't score too highly on the cba and lost out to other priorities ...'

X021 page 001.01 (tape 01.1.01) David Notes/Tape 19/10/93

Social influence: Organisation: Structure
Technical influence: IT environment: IT organisation


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