Leadership and organizational transformation

Organizational Transformation

Overcoming Complacency and Resistance to Change at Cincom Systems: A Case Study

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Complacency, not competition, continues to be one of the most common contributors to companies losing their competitive advantage. Cincom Systems has successfully built an enterprise software business which is based on annual maintenance fees from customers. As a result, their customers have standardized on the Cincom enterprise software products and it is less expensive to pay the annual maintenance fees that replace Cincom's software with another software vendors. As a result, Cincom has created a captive revenue stream that can be forecast with a degree of certainty as to its financial contribution. Despite this unique success of their business model, Cincom has become complacent in its marketing, new product development and services businesses. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate each of these three strategic areas and define a synchronized strategy that relies on Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) to re-define core process areas in each functional area. In conjunction with BPR-based redesign of critical processes in marketing, new product development and services, the use of the leadership transformation model (Bass, 1990) to explain how Cincom's senior management can overcome the complacency that runs the risk of degrading the competitive, financial and operational performance the company if the management team lets it go on too long. Clearly a sense of urgency is needed to overcome these challenges.