For an international health care/pharmaceutical manufacturer, Mr. Hochron was part of a small management consulting team whose purpose was to identify ways to reduce maintenance costs. The effort entailed interviewing staff, executive IT management, and internal IT clients.  The goal was to both find short-term (3-6 months) quick-wins as well as to lay the foundation for persistent change.  The net result was a collection of 17 projects, which included 4 hard hitting quick wins.  The nature of the projects were segmented as (a) strategy action plans, (b) organizational action plans, (c) process execution action plans, and (d) architecture action plans.

For the Procurement Materials & Management Division of a regional Bell operating company, Mr. Hochron assisted in the development of an Information Technology (IT) Strategy and Plan. The primary goal was to better align IT with the business mission. The company had recently completed an enterprise-wide process reengineering effort, which created significant change to the supply chain. This change was compounded, by the fact that their legacy systems were highly specialized, interdependent, and expensive to maintain. The IT Plan evaluated the business process, level of automation in support of the business process, and the current portfolio of application. The resulting three-year plan defined sixteen application projects and eight infrastructure support projects to migrate Materials Management from their highly interdependent mainframe-centric environment to a much more flexible 3-tier client/server environment built upon a standards-based architecture. Benefits realized include faster time-to-market, reduced maintenance costs, radically improved information delivery, and better alignment to changing market and regulatory requirements.

For a regional bell operating company, Mr. Hochron assisted the CIO Core Team develop a transformation plan for all of Information Systems. The purpose of this transformation plan is to change its systems sufficiently to support the reengineered business processes. Specifically, the urgent need was to identify and resolve process/application and process/subject area gaps and excesses. Although the company has some overlapping efforts, this project’s primary output is the development of a standardsbased applications architecture. The project was composed of several phases (a) selection of a process mapping and simulation tool, (b) creation of an overall framework for process mapping--one that supports multiple concurrent process modelers, (c) training, and (d) overall mobilization (the scope of this modeling effort is very broad, it encompasses the entire corporation). Expected benefits from this project are fulfillment of the reengineered business processes, reduced IS costs, increased customer delight, and fewer applications to maintain.

For a regional bell operating company, Mr. Hochron assisted the CIO Core Team to redefine their IT processes to better align them with their core business needs. The project, formally known as “Running IT Like A Business,” defined nine key IT processes. For each of these nine processes the project team (a) rated them against best practices, (b) defined their primary activities, (c) defined areas for improvement that would achieve best practice standards, (d) defined key IT metrics that can measure progress, (e) defined progress-to-date that support the EndState Vision, (f) defined projects that will fully align these IT processes to the business needs thus achieving “best practice” standards, and (g) initiated project mobilization. Expected benefits include much stronger alignment with business goals (objectives, CSFs, etc.), radically improved client satisfaction, dramatic decrease in project rework, and dramatic increase in IS flexibility and responsiveness to changing business needs.