Amgen Signs with IBM

TF is gone! He announced he is leaving at the end of the year. DM will be the new CIO!!

 

Did he retire, leave for something else, or get let go? What does this mean for the IBM contract?

 

Says he is leaving to "pursue external opportunities" whatever that means... I think most will assume he got the boot for the IBM disaster!

 

This place is a circus! The irony is DM and her band of half wits led the outsourcing project with IBM. Truly, amateur hour at its best from the infrastructure experts. Time has been ticking for TF, especially since GS took the hit for the SAP debacle. Who is next in the queue...

 

2010 CIO Hall of Fame Inductees Tout Business Breakthroughs
– Kim S. Nash, CIO

November 01, 2010

The five accomplished executives we induct this year into the CIO Hall of Fame are leaders defined by the drive to test themselves and, in the process, push their organizations to new heights. They combine superb management with technology prowess to produce a line of sustained financial results for the public and private sectors.

Some of our honorees point to opportunities early in their careers that set them on a course to create competitive value from software and hardware. Like Frank Modruson of Accenture, who landed an entry-level technology job that he says taught him business lessons. And Tom Murphy of AmerisourceBergen (ABC), who worked for bosses that gave him room to experiment. Sure, luck may have played a role. But the wit to recognize and run with an opportunity has set apart these CIOs—as well as Tom Flanagan of Amgen, Filippo Passerini of Procter & Gamble and Brent Stacey of Idaho National Laboratory—throughout their careers.

 

This really needed to happen. Regardless of who was driving the IBM outsourcing, Tom was the one with the final say and decided to listen to slick sales people and screwed the company in the process. The one thing DM has going for her now is that she learned a very painful lesson at someone else's expense. Should be quite interesting to see how many people come back to Amgen if they dump IBM.

 

It needs to happen to the whole bunch in the IS leadership team - not much talent there. As for the people coming back, their choices are 1. Stay with IBM and move to a new company (in a down housing market), 2. Look for a new job in a tough job market and sketchy IT area, or 3. Go back to the dog that bit them (twice I may add). Ugly choices.

 

4. Think outside the Ventura County box and look elsewhere for IT jobs. In the Silicon Valley, for example, IT unemployment is VERY low, probably on the order of < 5%. I have talked to a lot of recruiters in the area, and they're all telling me that they are fighting each other for talent (and no, I am not looking for a job, I'm looking to hire someone and it's very hard to find good people right now).

 

The SAP debacle was only because TF had it implemented so quickly - with a novice crew of IBM contractors driving the technical initiative. Most of the IBM crew were learning SAP as they implemented it at IBM (java portal, Exchange Infrastructure, BW, etc). SAP is a quality product, but when its slammed in (like Amgen did) then you get an unstable system. Also, Amgen should have NEVER implemented it on a Windoze platform (using MSSQL) - it should have been implemented on a Unix system with a quality (and proven) database such as Oracle.

Just another example of how IBM "quality" screwed Amgen.

 

Check the stats. More SAP implementations are on Windows than any other platform (in fact, probably more than all others combined), and probably 75-80+% of those are on SQL. Just because it's currently deployed on Windows/SQL doesn't mean putting it on Unix/Oracle would have been any better.

Whether it's a Ford or a Ferrari, if you have a bunch of retarded monkeys building them you will still end up with an unusable POS.

 

Well, I have a friend tell me back in July '10 that if IBM was going to be ousted it would be after TF was booted out. He also said to look for that to happen before December. Home run friend...
I do not know TF personally but I have seen enough of his handy work to say I would not elect to work for him again.
As for the outsourcing... Amgen did treat most of the displaced staff well financially and if you had a pulse you were insured a job with IBM for a year on the Amgen site and no change in salary. Not a bad move on Amgen's part since the displaced employees could have been sent packing and no guarantee. That gave most of them one year to find a new home. If asked I would consider going back... at least give it a once over.
As for the Amgen SAP/ERP install. It is a complete gack.
Installed on Microsoft Windows simply because it was cheaper to use the existing licensing agreement with Microsoft that includes SQL rather that stepping up to the big leagues and use Unix/Oracle!
Come on. I spent the better part of 2 years fighting specific issues surrounding that install as a service provider just to discover the Amgen/IBM team deployed it in ways that SAP would not support (Can't divulge details) but it resulted in hundreds of delayed Amgen orders and thousands of man hours while everyone was pointing fingers at each other only to find out the application did not support the process as deployed and for Christ’s sake SAP even had it documented as unsupported in a MS environment.
Way to go TF in deploying as state of the art gold plated pile of crap.
Now Amgen is reviewing replacing it with a Unix platform.
Just another example of TF stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime.
Now possibly TF was just taking orders from above but that is yet to be seen.

 

To the person that said check out the stats on SAP implementations on Windows platforms - please post a link to your "stats" because every SAP shop I've ever worked in was implemented on Unix (HPUX, AIX, etc). There is NO WAY the majority of the world's SAP systems are running on Windoze .... no way. A quality SAP implementation is done on large Unix servers - and it's done over a decent amount of time so that it is implemented correctly and to ensure that all of the users are trained properly. Platinum SAP support is also usually on site when a company performs an implementation the size Amgen did - but since TF was in bed with IBM that's who Amgen went with. Amgen did not implement SAP correctly and it's user base was not trained properly. It was slammed in so that TF could have his bragging rights. Thank god he's gone ... now we'll see what happens.

 

Well, a decision to bring data centers back in house is all but made. When it is done, this deal is going to cost Amgen tens of millions of dollars in waste. And, the person in charge of IS, is the person who did the deal (or a major part of it). Cronyism at its best.

 

There is actually no hope of bringing this back successfully. Especially if you put an absolute blithering idiot into a critical role. KL for networks?? Next is probably PF or JR for Apps. Then again, SG always gave great meaningless presentations that DM would fall all over.

Minimal technical leadership left thanks to CN and DM. But nice PowerPoint talking heads!

 

Actually, the data centers never really left. Almost nothing was successfully transferred to Boulder despite over 2 years of “planning”. After all, IBM doesn’t know how to run a data centre better than AMGN!

In point of fact, the waste, lost productivity, terminations and rehiring (for those that might come back), and payments are probably an interesting source of investigation. Tens of millions is likely a huge underestimate given how much overpayment was in the original contract.

 

And now, TF is employed at IBM? Love it.

 

Hey that isn't fair, didn't he already get a bonus the great job he did on the out sourcing effort?

 

Many SAP installs are on Windows. First, you have to determine App Server or database. The App servers can be on windows - they are virtualized and load balanced. The database is not. Second, check the size of the installs. In a smaller company, or a large one with many instances, Windows and SQL are ok. In a large and/or single instance environment, the typical database is Oracle or DB2..