Inadequate Support from Senior Management
For any project improvement initiative to be successful, senior management needs to provide adequate support. However, the CIO at Celanese had doubts regarding the benefits of reengineering the IT process and thus failed to offer the needed support to steer the process forward. The IT directors were also skeptical about the benefits of starting the SLM services to improve customer relations. They needed to formally introduce the ITIL process to the organization, but their hesitance resulted in the workforce’s lack of awareness of the ITIL methodology. The procedure was ineffective because leadership only focused on short-term results and failed to evaluate the long-term benefits of improving the IT processes.
A Decentralized IT Approach
Celanese did not have a central IT department – all six units in the organization had their individual IT units which operated independently. This setup resulted in a serious lack of transparency, especially in operational costs. There was also strong resistance to having a centralized IT system because of the team’s belief that “everything central is evil.” This perception among workers within the organization made it difficult to transition to a centralized system. It also stifled the development of a shared IT service within the entire company.
Poor Internal Coordination
There were apparent weaknesses and limitations in the company’s internal coordination. There were also restrictions in the project approval practices accompanied by bias in allocating resources and funds for IT, which resulted in budget overturns for various organizational units. Furthermore, gaps in the proposed procedures were also vivid. The Celanese IT department hired an external company, particularly HP, to evaluate its IT procedures. The assessment revealed that the infrastructure and application groups had similar processes that the management handled differently. For example, according to Schultze, the incident, change, release, and problem belonged to the SAP team. These management processes were not replicated in other IT units, making the entire system faulty.
Poor Communication
There was also a severe lack of proper communication among the various units in the company. This above-mention factor resulted in budget miscalculations that impacted the improvement processes negatively. The lack of clear communication between three primary teams: ITILers, OSM, and the vendors, was also prevalent.
Cultural Differences
Most staff members had clashing cultural differences and beliefs that made it hard to improve IT processes. For instance, some believed that the centralization of IT systems was evil, and this resulted in resistance to change. Without a change in belief and alignment with organizational values, it became hard for everyone to buy into the idea of process improvement. Also, the engineering culture at the organization made it difficult for it to improve IT internal processes. The employees had previous beliefs that IT was bureaucratic. As such, they thought that implementing highly rigorous procedures would further perpetuate this already negative reputation.