Touching the void

• Article 69 of 77
• Information Age, July 2004

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To Ball, it was clear that the project was doomed from the beginning, since few basic questions had been asked. "There didn't seem to be any consideration in the implementation of how our daily working lives were actually run and how the system would impact and change those. I ended up being the militant shop steward and saying, 'We can't do our daily job and achieve things you want us to achieve because what you're doing with this is reversing our efficiency, rather than increasing it.'"

Ball was not alone in his dislike of the new system, with colleagues becoming "angry, resentful, emotionally checked out and fearful". But few passed on their dislike of the new system to managers. When he consulted his US colleagues and asked if they were using the system, "they said, 'No, because it didn't work'. They went on the training courses, nodded like 'Stepford wives' and then just went on doing things the way they'd always been done."

When management became aware of the sales team's dislike of the system, they asked Ball to get involved in helping with the implementation. "It raised the question of who was going to do my day-job? Who would be looking after my clients? Who was actually going to take into account that a percentage of my income was based on commission, which is based on me doing a selling job, not on the implementation of an IT system?" Eventually, says Ball, the system "got placed in the 'too hard' tray". Parts of it were implemented, such as shared customer contact databases, but the full suite with shared prospect information and sales prospecting was never fully used. "It was declared a success, in as much as bits were being used and the vendor took the licence money, but full value for money and return on investment? I don't think they ever went there."

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