Organizational Change at Cincom Systems

Organizational Change at Cincom Systems Cincom Systems has been one of the oldest and most entrenched companies in the enterprise software market. Their focus on designing applications based on the Microsoft Server and Microsoft Windows operating systems has led to a consistent revenue stream of nearly $100M a year. Their problems however stem from the fact that many in the company, mostly the senior managers and executives who came up through engineering to run the company, see the emerging platform of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a threat and are rejecting it.

The problem is that many customers are choosing to rely on SaaS as their platform of choice due to cost and flexibility value and are leaving behind traditional applications built on operating systems. Analysis of Change at Cincom First, the company is clearly in a state of shock as their best sales people are leaving for SaaS-based competitors where they can make their quotas and earn more money.

There is also the fact that the majority of their customers has either asked for SaaS or has considered SaaS-based competitors in all sales cycles. The flagship products at Cincom all compete with companies who are primarily SaaS-based as well where just three years ago they competed with other traditional enterprise applications. The messages from the external environment have become so obvious that many middle-level managers are now pushing Cincom to move to the SaaS platform and stop the exodus of their best sales people and customers.

From an organizational change transition curve standpoint, Cincom is grappling with Denial and Awareness right now, moving to Acceptance. The direction the company is talking towards creating pilot programs to evaluate the performance of their applications on the cloud platforms is also stabilizing their customer base. The senior executives who are for the most part from engineering, are taking a wait-and-see approach to how effective the use of a 3rd party is for porting the Cincom applications to the cloud-based platforms from Salesforce.com.

The group of leaders who are in charge of the transition of specific piloted applications are concentrating on creating a dashboard of metrics to show how effectively the move to a more scalable and cost-effective platform is. Resistance to change is being dealt with through testing, which is consistent with the change transition curve. Conclusion The search aspects of the change transition curve have led to the decision to standardize on the Salesforce.com platform, specifically Force.com given its use of technologies compatible with legacy Cincom applications.

The integration aspects of the change transition curve however have been more difficult as the culture within Cincom is very slow to change. The reliance on the legacy applications is so great nearly 70% of all revenue is attributable to them. Further, the metrics.