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Change in structure
Notes:
Although the companies started life as one company by the period of last year's case study it had been split into two seperate companies with a controlling group...
Engineering were responsible for delivering hardware solutions, such as hand held radio date terminals. Limited were responsible for delivering total warehouse management solutions, i.e. the software and hardware and services required to deliver a solution.
The business changed in a number of ways: -
New technologies developed by Engineering lead them to develop software solutions to broaden the usefulness of their hardware. (These were largely based on eVB, with eVC++ for some platform specific features.)
Limited diversified the range of software solutions that it developed to extend them through the supply chain. These included both the “traditional” Cobol/flat file based solutions and the more recent Java/RDBMS solutions.
Two different development cultures, driven by two different ways of expanding the market (horizontal vs vertical) using two different technologies...
A decision was taken to merge the companies. One effect of this was that two directors (with different backgrounds and management styles) now had an interest in software development processes.