“In that case,” Lassiter responded, “I guess we’ll see
you in court,” at which point the phone conversation ended
abruptly.
Enter Sage Niele
On December 1, 2010, Ed Wilson stepped down—
although he was retained as a part-time consultant and
given the title of the political action committee’s
Executive Director—and Sage Niele arrived as Vice
President of Operations and Chief Financial Officer. Niele
held an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and
had previously performed systems manager responsibili-
ties for a large pharmaceutical company in the Midsouth
area. More recently, she had operated her own information
systems and financial consulting business. With two small
children at home, she had decided to pursue something
less rigorous and time-consuming than running her own
business, but it soon became clear to her that this position
might not fit that billing.
A few days into her position, Lassiter met with Niele
in his office:
Sage, it’s good to have you on board. I need you to
begin a planning and assessment process to deter-
mine the deficiencies of the current information
system, along with the MSCC’s needs, and the alter-
natives that exist in the event the MSCC needs to
scrap the DMA system and start over. From this day
forward, you are to be the exclusive contact person
between the MSCC and DMA. I have begun the
process of finding a suitable, top-notch replacement
for Gramen, which will help you in your cause. I’ll
give him two months to find a new job, but we have
to let him go.That next week, Lassiter, Niele, and Gramen met
with an attorney specializing in computer software con-
tracts who had also been a past Chairman and current
Executive Committee member of the MSCC. Lassiter out-
lined the situation for her, but her assessment was far
worse than Lassiter had imagined.
“The way I see this contract,” she began, “The
MSCC has few, if any remedies. I wish you had contacted
me earlier—before the contract was signed. The absence
of performance standards leaves you with only one real
remedy, avoidance of payment. Because you have already
made full payment, you have given tacit acceptance of the
software system. From speaking with Leon earlier, I
understand that your goal is to either receive reimburse-
ment and the source code from DMA—so you can hire a
consultant to make the software usable—orto get your
money back and buy another system. These outcomes are
unlikely. In my opinion, you need to tone down your
demeanor with DMA and try to get as much additional
progress out of them as possible until you decide what to
do. If DMA does get serious about cutting off their
support, pay what you think you owe and we’ll go after
them for specific performance.”
Taking that advice to heart, several additional pieces
of correspondence were internally generated and sent to
DMA with a more temperate tenor. Meanwhile, Niele con-
tinued to send DMA payments for only those items the
MSCC deemed to be billable. Each time she crossed her
fingers that DMA would not pull the plug.
With the help of the MSCC librarian, Niele identi-
fied a list of eight software packages that would run on an
HP hardware platform, that were designed for use in a
trade association environment, and that appeared to be
worthy of further investigation. At the same time, she
began interviewing MSCC staff members to prepare an
inventory of the current system deficiencies as well as the
needs for the future. An outgrowth of this effort was the
creation of an ad hocinformation systems committee that
she used to help flatten her learning curve about the MSCC
and its current information systems.
Furthermore, Niele also spoke with Lassiter and key
board members to determine their vision for the opera-
tional future of the MSCC. And Niele arranged for six
CEOs from the Executive Committee to have their IS man-
agers or other key IS staff members serve on a steering
committee to assist her in evaluating systems alternatives.
Not only did that give her additional points of view, but she
hoped this would make it easier to sell her final recommen-
dation to the Executive Committee.
Unfortunately, Niele also knew that her assessment
of the current situation and the alternatives she had iden-
tified to date would not be attractive to the Executive
Committee. On a legal pad in her office, she wrote down
the problems as she saw them: (1) The modules will like-
ly never become operational, (2) DMA is unwilling to
commit the resources necessary to finish the job, (3) the
DMA relationship is still deteriorating quickly, (4) any
costs already itemized are likely sunk due to poor con-
tracting, (5) it will be expensive to start over from
scratch, and (6) it is equally expensive to do nothing.
Now the big question was, where to go from here?
As the microwave sounded to signal that her popcorn
was ready, Sage wondered which problems she would be
putting to an end through her recommendations and which
problems she would start by making additional changes.Case Study I-7 • Midsouth Chamber of Commerce (B): Cleaning Up an Information Systems Debacle 185