Asked about that after his talk, Haney summed up the choice as being between bringing in people from the outside, such as consultants, or training his IT staff to work on the integration.
"Who is passionate about the brand other than the employees who work for the company?" Haney said. He didn't have much time to answer other questions. Saying he had to get to a meeting, he picked up his black leather jacket from a chair and headed off.
But before Haney spoke at the conference, attended by some 5,000 people, the audience was primed for his presentation with a Harley-Davidson film titled "Live by It,"which offered a lyrical, fuguelike salute to the biker lifestyle, showing ever-increasing numbers of Harley riders zooming along highways while a voice-over explained what bikers are about. The film included this line: "We believe in wearing black because it doesn't show any dirt or weakness."
While this expression of a biker's creed may fit a company like Harley, it's almost a certain bet it's not what Haney's previous employer would have said. Haney joined Harley last summer, leaving a company that works hard at keeping things clean -- Whirlpool Corp., which is well known for its clothes washers and driers.
Best-of-breed not always best of price
When it comes to best-of-breed products, Hurkan Balkir, IT director of marketing solutions at Schaumburg, Ill.-based financial services company Experian, believes these products have their place, and their place isn't in IT projects that cost in the low-to-midtier range.
"I'm not saying that best of breed is a bad approach. I'm saying best-of-breed requires customization and expertise in many things," said Balkir. "It's a more expensive approach."
If a best-of-breed product can lead to a 10 percent performance gain, for instance, Balkir says he may be willing to forgo that gain because increasing the number of vendors the company has to deal with can increase costs as well, especially if it's an IT project that only costs US$10,000 to $50,000.
But if a best-of-breed product can deliver a 10 percent performance gain to an IT project that costs $1 million, then the extra cost of managing another vendor may be worth it, Balkir said.
SSA strives to go paperless: Saving trees and time
The Social Security Administration wants to be completely paperless and over the past several years has focused on eliminating paper in disability benefits processing. While it is now scanning millions of pages of documents daily, it so far isn't significantly reducing what can be a yearlong wait for disability benefits, according to Thomas Grzymski, deputy assistant commissioner of enterprise support for the SSA.
Disability benefit processing involves multiple parties and reports from medical providers such as doctors and hospitals, which can result in files that are inches thick. The paperless project has cut about a week off that processing time, mostly as a result of eliminating the need for mail. But the agency believes that weeks of processing time could be saved as electronic scanning, which now covers as much as 60 percent of the disability-related paperwork, and other process improvements take hold. Much is still on paper, Grzymski said, but "everything that is new is going paperless."