Eterra is a part of Merkantildata who is one of the largest Computer companies in Scandinavia.
The company has Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark as its work base. About 30 years ago, the company was just a hand full of people on the way down when Tom Adolfsen took over as manager. The company has from then steadily been growing and buying up companies to achieve faster growth. Two years ago the company Merkantildata where logically split up in Ementor and Eterra. Merkantildata is now a holding company.Ementor is a consulting company with programmers and non-product oriented consulting in ICT with a focuses on providing services for the public sector, banking & finance, trade & industry, energy, telecommunications and the media.
Eterra bases its solutions on partnerships with six leading international technology companies: IBM, Compaq, Sun, Cisco, Microsoft and HP, and bases its solutions on technology from leading vendors in six focus areas: Client, Server, Storage, Network, Advanced telephony and IT-security.As the market has fallen, the need for efficiency has been a made clearer and has become a focus area in Eterra. Cost efficiency has never been the company's strong side as the market has been growing in a rapid rate most of the lifespan of the company. Growth has been taken for granted in the computer market for a long time no one could see an end to the growth and the money where coming in at a high rate.To grow Eterra was buying companies all the time with little to no time to incorporate the companies in to a company culture.
This has lead to 300+ cultures and ways to do things in the company. Every small department where ones a company and are still living by there one rules. This is not giving the synergies needed in todays marked. The management has been changed giving room for new leadership.
They have started to change the company culture and methods of working.The aim of this report is to analyze the ongoing change process from the employee's point of view, and describe and analyze the ongoing change in work structure in Eterra. We will also compare the ongoing change with the theories available. From this, pinpoint some issues that have to be taken care of to make the change proceed successful. There have been some limitations writing this essay, first we have only analyzed the Oslo office (with the largest problem), secondly we are in general writing this from the employees point of view.There have not been time for any quantitative analyses and therefore a lot of the information is from internal meetings in "AMU", in Norway the employee's representative looking at work conditions.
The management was confronted by the largest customer realizing that many if not most routines and procedures within the company where not documented. In addition, in the last few years the economy and the investments in the area of ICT had dramatically decreased. This has influenced Eterra a lot, spreading a light on the fact that the company was not as cost efficient as it needed be.
