Description of Harmony Harmony is a large facilities management company with a turnover in excess of £2 billion per annum. They provide a variety of building management services to many blue chip clients, including security, cleaning and building maintenance, allowing the client to focus on their key business strategy. This area of business is growing, and Harmony has also won a number of deals with the government under a PPP (Public/ Private Partnership) agreement. Of its 12,000 staff, roughly half are office based and have their own PCs. There are plans (as yet unrealized) to make available to the rest of the workforce access to the corporate Intranet through web kiosks and other innovative delivery methods including Internet enabled mobile phones. A number of people are also using their iPhones, and want to be able to access their company email through them. Many middle and senior managers work from home, and there is a large proportion of mobile workers who work in offices across the country who rely totally upon their laptops. Staff turnover is relatively low, with over half the employees having been employed for more than five years. However, in common with many companies, Harmony has had to close its final salary pension scheme to new entrants. This has created a feeling of resentment amongst the new employees, that the ‘old timers’ have a much better benefits package than the ‘young blood’. The HR department is struggling to keep up with requests for flexible working and part-time working, and staff development is ad-hoc. The business is arranged into a number of business units, each with their own managing director. These are focused on business functions (Roads Maintenance, Healthcare, Corporate clients), not regionally based. The organisation is ‘socially aware’, and has sponsored a number of high profile community initiatives, from the development of a Harmony Cricket league within Birmingham, to allowing employers to volunteer time to help in nature conservation in alliance with the National Trust. There are a lot of different computer systems in use within the company. These range from small MS-Access databases used to track on site maintenance requests to an old payroll and human resource system which pays all employees. All of the corporate wide systems are ''legacy'' systems, nearly two decades old and character based. The finance system is not euro compliant, and is struggling with the current throughput. A recent investigation into the feasibility of implementing a single enterprise resource planning system (ERP) system concluded that the cost (£15 - £20 million) could not be justified as there would need to be a huge increase in IT and IS resource, both in terms of staff and equipment.