Century Medical
Case Background
This case is about the development of new technology at Century Medical – a large medical products company based in Connecticut. For the past few years, the company had made significant progress by integrating technology into its systems and processes.
Sam Nolan is the Chief Information Officer at Century Medical. He has been working with Century Medical for the past 4 years. He has taken initiatives and led projects to design and implement various systems for Century Medical.
One of them was a benefits-administration system for the HR department of the company. The other was a web-based purchasing system that improved the purchasing of supplies and capital goods. These new systems automated the various office processes. This not only drastically reduced the time required to carry out the related tasks but also left the managers with more time so that they could concentrate on the value added activities. The projections showed that the system was to save Century Medical $2 million annually.
This technology upgrade was possible because Sam Nolan was successful in making the people in the company recognise the various benefits (like information and knowledge sharing, integrated business processes, better team co-ordination, etc) associated with the new technology.
Problem Identification
Sam Nolan had proposed a new web-based job posting system for the organisation. The idea was to ease the hiring of personnel from within the organisation. The system would link Century’s managers, recruiters and the job applicants. This would lead to a lot of savings in terms of recruiting and training cost. Sam Nolan also gathered a project team to develop the idea. Later the project got endorsed by the executive vice-president Sandra Ivey who gave Nolan the authorisation to go ahead with the project.
But then Sandra Ivey resigned and her replacement Tom Carr did not show much...
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