LAO was born of a merger of four product-focused Lucas companies in the late 1980s. Systems were inherited from each of the component businesses and were pulled together in an attempt to create an effective operational entity. This undertaking was inevitably very difficult to manage. The bottom-up approach was not able to achieve the desired degree of cohesion.

Many other large corporations have learned the same lesson during the last few years. Research in other corporations has revealed that ill-informed systems development planning has led to some critically inaccurate decisions being taken - ten man years being invested in a project which had to be cancelled, a six month delay in product re-pricing, £50K spent on a package that could not be used, a one year delay in introducing a new product - all critical in an overall business sense, aside from the obvious IT impact.

In practice at LAO, many system developers had worked on the legacy applications for several years in an attempt to reconcile them and provide the necessary capability. This required much effort and time; from such a diverse base of code and systems, the fit was unlikely ever to be perfect. With a generally forward-thinking approach to IT and systems, LAO was not content to settle for half-measures. It resolved to address the problem head-on, and began to investigate options to overhaul its IT planning and development process.

An overall system development method

In 1993 Mike Lock, IT Manager at LAO, started looking into the problem of the inconsistent management information currently available from the various European databases and platforms. He initiated a Data Management project with the objective of consolidating this data, but realised that re-developing individual systems was not necessarily the right approach. He needed an overall systems development method in order to build consistency and flexibility into systems at their inception. At the end of 1993 Mike was introduced to IBM's Business System Development Method (BSDM).

Many such methods are available today: why choose IBM? Mike explains, "We didn't want a method based on processes because we had some experience of these and had found that they could easily return us to the usual situation of systems which could not adapt to change in our business. IBM's model-based approach offered the additional flexibility that we wanted."

IBM's BSDM has now been accepted as the standard method for system development in LAO. While the executive management acceptance of the method was pleasing, and the high priority of the project helped to gain internal focus, it was equally important to get LAO staff convinced of its value, and actively inputting to the project. Together, Mike and the IBM consultant ran a number of workshops for the different business areas of LAO.