Deconstructing Neste (cont.)

Some Disassembly Required

In taking things apart, lessons for putting them together

In some ways, taking apart two companies is not unlike a merger or acquisition, Keskiivari notes. "Having good documentation, and knowing what's in it, is very valuable. You need to know what you have, where it is, how it is set up, and so on. And, if you can avoid it, you also wouldn't want to take on a second, large-scale project like we did with the outsourcing piece of it."

Likewise, it was important to set goals and clearly define roles and responsibilities. "We wrote things down, but sometimes what meant one thing to us meant something completely different to our counterparts on the other side of the process," Keskiivari says. "You have to involve the business, too. That's critical."

A fork in the road

Ensuring adequate resources also challenged Neste Oil's IT team. They flexed up by leveraging more of HP's resources and from others in their multi-vendor environment. The team also put an additional four or five members on the job to help manage sub-projects such as application migration, the extranet and intranet environments, the UNIX and HP-UX environments, and the worldwide rollout.

"We also brought someone onto the team from our corporate communications department. That was actually very important because there were lots of changes to communicate to the users and back to us." Using internal publications, emails, and intranet sites-both project-specific and the homepage-the word was spread throughout the organization about upcoming IT changes, what to expect, and how to respond. "People understood this separation was happening no matter what, so there wasn't the resistance you normally get when you implement something new, but there were a lot of issues to contend with."

Decidedly different from a merger or acquisition was the fact that these two entities were literally coming apart and, as such, no longer had the same goals or priorities. "From a business point of view, we were going in two different directions. We managed to work things out, of course, but you have to take into account that you do not all share a common endpoint," Keskiivari says. "We have operations in different countries. Even in the countries where we both had a presence, the scope of the work was different from one business to the other, and yet we had to share some of the same resources. In some cases, the opposite was true. Resources or expertise available to us before were no longer there; they resided in the other company."

Assets took on a new meaning in the context of the divestiture between Fortum and Neste Oil. "Not only did we have to negotiate and decide who among us got which hard assets and at what price, but things like software licenses had to be renegotiated and re-contracted, too."

Human resources issues were another area flipped upside down. When companies merge, employees knows where they are going-to the new company. When companies split, the issue becomes who's going to which organization and what gaps remain. "It was easier with some groups than with others. Some had clearly defined skill-sets, specific to the oil IT systems and we transferred those groups as a unit," says Keskiivari. "In other cases, it was more difficult, so we ended up announcing the open positions for people to apply."

Going with the flow

It's important to stick to deadlines when dealing with a project of this size and scale, Keskiivari stresses. If things start to go wrong, don't be lulled into an unrealistic optimism. "Things will go wrong, and the tendency is to be optimistic that they will be taken care of. But then you realize things aren't getting better, and you have already lost a bit of time. So you hurry to catch up to avoid having to tell management you're behind schedule. Then people start losing confidence in IT. Better to face the situation right away."

With the divestiture behind him, Keskiivari can apply the lessons learned there to Neste Oil management's latest initiative-diversification. With an eye toward keeping pace with increasing demands for biofuel worldwide, the company has developed its own production technology for a high-end diesel fuel made from renewable raw materials. Besides its own production, the company also partnered with Total in France and OMV in Austria to plan production and distribution of NExBTL diesel, which can flexibly use virtually any vegetable oil and animal fat as raw material. "We believe it's a sector where we can take an early lead," he explains.

Dave Clarke Mora is editor in chief of CIO Digest: Strategies and Analysis from Symantec.