Gartner, Align Thyself

Gartner CIO Bart Stanco took the job in the spring of 1999at the height of the dotcom boom. At that point, the ITdepartment had no system to determine which projects wouldbest support the company's strategy. “There were multipleprojects for the same function, projects at cross-purposes,“Stanco says. “We found that we were working on too many ofthe wrong things.“

For example, when Stanco took the reins, Gartner had twoteams working on two projects, both intended to supportpricing structures for research services. One group wasdeveloping a software tool to customize research and pricesfor individual clients' needs. The other group was workingon systems to streamline pricing by offering the entirearray of research on a per-user basis.

Stanco worked with Gartner executives to pull the plug onthe project to tailor individual offerings and adopt a newcommunity-based pricing scheme. This method took the latterapproach – providing a client with the complete menuof Gartner research services. However, those changes weremade only after Gartner had wasted months working on bothprojects with approximately 50 staff members andconsultants, Stanco says. With costs of around $1,500 perday for each outside IT consultant, that kind of efforteasily added up to $1 million a month.

Lack of communication among IT groups and Gartner'sworldwide business units also caused the company to missopportunities to cut costs. For example, nearly 80 percentof the company's 4,600-member workforce uses laptops, butthere was no centralized purchasing process as there isnow. The cost of extra support and missed opportunities forvolume pricing came to more than $8 million a year,estimates Stanco.

Another troubling symptom of Gartner's misalignment was poormorale among staff and executives at all levels that wasgenerated by an almost complete lack of communication. “Youand the person you were working with in [IT] didn't know forsure whether anyone in the company was thinking aboutanything similar to what you were thinking about,“ saysMoira Collins, senior vice president of worldwide marketing.