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Farm Credit Services' CIO wanted to put high-tech tools into old hands. But he forgot to prepare his users, so the project went over like an early frost.
"How many acres do you farm? What's your wife's name?" Sean Halcomb wants to know.
He's a loan officer at Farm Credit Services (FCS) of Illinois, an agricultural lending institution. When Halcomb gets a new client, his first move is to jot down the essentials: "How many acres they farm, what the guy's wife's name is, what his dog's name is and all that stuff," he says.
Many FCS of Illinois loan officers have been helping farmers buy land and feed the nation since the mid-1970s. Their livelihood is built on old-fashioned business relationships forged on a handshake and passed on from generation to generation.
It was into this traditional environment that FCS of Illinois hired city slicker James Fielder as CIO in 2001. Even though the agricultural lending business harks back to the Civil War, technologies of the past decade presented opportunities for greater efficiencies. Fielder envisioned loan officers toting tablet PCs, tapping into applications over the Internet and zapping data to a centralized location.
The trouble was that he forgot to ask the old hands first.
And so begins the yarn of how Fielder learned a valuable lesson about paying your dues before giving orders, otherwise known as "change management." With IT projects, the old adage "Shoot first, ask questions later" often leads to failure. If anything, Fielder's experience is a good reminder that people -- that is, users -- don't like change and therefore must be engaged if they're going to accept new ways of doing things. Such management skill may not be a technologist's first inclination, but not having it may be his downfall.
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