ABSTRACT
The company, Technocom (TC),1 was formally created as a separate legal entity as a result of an extensive restructuring of the parent firm, a global high-tech, Global Tech (GT). Global Tech was founded at the beginning of the 1930s and established itself rather successfully in the international markets during the 1970s and 1980s. In order to exploit what it believed to be a core competence within a particular product and technology development unit it decided to separate out that competence to an independent company, Technocom (with Global Tech as the owner). TC produces technically very sophisticated and highly developed systems and applications for the high-tech industry. Technocom could thus potentially exploit this core competence and market it to other companies. The high-tech companies using software from Technocom would thus gain access to cutting-edge technology with limited investments in R&D. The CTO explains the background to the creation of the firm:
The GT internal unit that became TC started in 1989-90 with the purpose of ensuring technical progression for product development. The unit was thus very research oriented. It had a project culture that was research oriented and which focused more on technical advancement rather than being finished at certain times and at certain costs. In the new environment that we now have as a business it is much more important (not only) to have the right quality, but also to be finished in time to the right cost. These are new rules for us and we concluded that the culture or the mindset, the attitudes to enable us to achieve this, were not right. So when we created TC we took the technical organization and added things one needs as an independent organization: finance, personnel, sales and marketing. These functions were new and got a fresh start; they were easy to fit in the new organization, while the technical development function was stuck in the old beliefs. From that came the initiative to start a culture programme. The purpose was to make people look in the mirror. It didn’t concern shifting people’s ways of thinking, which you don’t do overnight. The strongest driving force is rather if you can make it obvious for people what is wrong and what we lack.
