You are the owner of a growing small business Over the years

You are the owner of a growing small business. Over the years, your customer database has been duplicated by various functional areas in the company, and adapted to their departmental needs. You would like to hire a consultant to consolidate the databases and create one master database which satisfies all departmental needs.

(1) What will you tell your managers to convince them to fully cooperate with the consultant? Be sure to succinctly define the benefits to your managers of a centralized system.
(2) What objections do you think your managers will have to the new system?
(3) How will you overcome their objections? Persuade your managers by overcoming their objections with compelling arguments. (Points : 35)

Solution

(1) What will you tell your managers to convince them to fully cooperate with the consultant? Be sure to succinctly define the benefits to your managers of a centralized system.

Having a centralized system will help the organization in multiple ways

1. Single view of a customer: This is a major benefit of having a centralized system, one can get a single view of a customer and his association with the company like, he may be having products of different functional areas of the company. Take an example business like a small scale bank and a customer can have a checking account/mortgage account and etc.

Maintaining a single repository, the company can view his complete portfolio and address his queries and needs better.

2.Data Integrity: Single repository will help the organization to avoid the duplication of data like customer address, phone , bank details and etc.

3.Hardware/Software requirement: By avoiding the duplication of data, one can save lot of hardware/software cost. The need of more hardware would come down.

4.Maintenance: If the database is centralized, the cost of maintaining the same would come down and can be maintained with less skilled manpower

(2) What objections do you think your managers will have to the new system?

1.Cost: It obvious the consultant work would come with cost, Managers may have strong objections on this

2.Necessity: Managers may feel, the necessity having a consultant work if the current business is not very encouraging for next 1 year.

3.Additional manpower: May need an additional manpower to understand the road map given by the consultant and implement the same that is creating a centralized repository and moving the existing data there

(3) How will you overcome their objections? Persuade your managers by overcoming their objections with compelling arguments. (Points : 35)

1.Benefits: Clearly articulate the benefits of having the centralized system like If the business grows then maintaining the same data at multiple places will increase the cost and also data integrity would be lost.

2.Slow Migration process: Instead of completely switching to centralized database, combine 2 or 3 databases of different functional areas and see the desired results and if successful then migrate remaining functional area database. Idea is to perform a small proof of concept.

3.Existing Team : Identify the best people across teams and try to utilize them for the migration work, instead of taking new team there by saving the manpower cost.