Struggles With Information System Implementation

What makes Information Systems Successful?

As you may remember from my first blog entitled "Who am I?", I was fortunate enough to work at EY for my third year work placement. In the blog I went into depth about a number of information systems which I had valuable exposure to and felt they brought great benefit overall to the business. In my opinion these systems are successful as they enhance the services provided by EY and help solve problems that the  company faces on a regular basis.

First Hand Experience With Struggles Of IS Implementation

While there are a number of information systems that have been successfully implemented in EY, there was one in particular which was brought in right around when I joined which they struggled to hit the ground running with. This IS was called Meera and how it worked was every staff member from intern all the way to partner was to fill out what they are going to be spending their time on for the next two weeks. This was brought in as a firm-wide solution that in theory is meant to decrease inefficiencies through allocating additional work to anybody that has free time throughout the coming fortnight. 

What Were The Issues?

While in theory the idea is great there were a number of issues. First off it was a very time consuming task. Managers are extremely busy on a day to day and now this was pilling on even more to their workload. 

Poor rationale is another big factor in why it hasn't been a smooth transition. The IS makes sense for auditors as they work project based so there are deadlines and alotted times for work. However in tax it is impossible to predict what you will be working on tomorrow never mind say in two weeks time.

Poor project management methodology of this IS has resulted in people in tax just inputting random clients to fill the two weeks otherwise those working in the Dublin office would be messaging with work to do. This just results in no end user satisfaction and miss communications across the firm.