KWPro.net

Well, the "official" word is that HLIKK will be suspending any "new business" in Japan.  They still have over 500k worth of contracts to support, but the bottom line is that people are going home and a big re-org will happen soon.  Considering the current market conditions and mentality of the Japanese, it's unlikely that in the near term future HLIKK will be able to recover to the point where they can start growing their business in Japan.  Which is why I've poignantly stated that for all intents and purposes they're dead.

My guess is that in the current situation, they'll attempt to honor existing contracts, but try asap to get someone to buy off the remaining assets, close shop and lick their wounds.  I imagine that they'll retain at most 50 people, relocate to a new, smaller, cheaper office while cleaning up.

Looking back at this company, I have to say that it's kinda sad.  There was a ton of potential for growth in the company because they had a hot product initially.  You can even read an article in Business Week praising HLIKK.  I'm certain the story shown here will not be unlike the famed burnouts of the more infamous dot-com burnouts like eToys.

I cannot say how other insurance companies like AIG, AXA or ING are doing by comparison in Japan.  However, what I can do is examine numerous factors that led to this level of a failure:

• Foreign companies typically have a difficult time penetrating a market like Japan, where branding and connections are key factors in the success of a company.  HLIKK had to fight to establish itself as a player against traditional companies.
• Lack of international experience, particularly in the Asian/Japanese market by the HQ.  While individuals themselves might have had some level of experience handling Japan, the majority of the expats I met, while being very nice people, just lacked the judgment in handling Japan.  Most barely spoke any Japanese and it wasn't unusual to see people who came over for the first time.  For leadership positions, they really needed locals to oversee the company.
• What works at the HQ should work everywhere.  I can't say on the business side whether or not this part was true, but on the IT side this viewpoint definitely existed.  Trying to enforce the IT standards in Japan, I felt, led to a lot of unnecessary fights that prevented the company from moving forward more quickly in Japan.  It's not that the Hartford's IT standards were poor, but dealing with issues like vendor management, getting everyone up to par on coding, etc. were nightmares.
• Trying to fit 200 years of experience into a start up mentality in a Japanese environment with a business model that is essentially geared towards low risk taking.  You have too many competing factors here.  Business needs to move fast to establish themselves in a highly competitive market, especially with more established and better connected businesses who can probably react by using their connections to prevent the start up from succeeding.  Yet how can you introduce agility into a business that must follow numerous regulations like SOX or JSOX that simply slow it down? (Especially when the regulators themselves aren't really clued in).  Well, certainly at the very least, you need to introduce processes that expedite how your business operates.  That wasn't done here.  Waterfall method?  Those belong in the military and NASA.
• Many generals on the battlefield but only a few soldiers.  In a startup environment, you need executors, people who can get a job done, not bureaucrats, not people who serve to create more paper work.  Heck, you probably should have that at in every business for that matter.  But certainly at the start up level, you need people who simply will do the work. Having a lead engineer, with an IT lead, with a project manager for the project, with the lead engineer's manager, with the assistant director, with the business owner....you get the idea.  I'd prefer to have three good engineers with one manager to verify that things are going according to plan than twelve managers breathing down my neck and watching me work.
  
• Project deliverables driven without meaningful deliverables.  Perhaps, the old school culture of Hartford impelled the desire to structure things so heavily.  But making processes extremely project oriented with deliverables that probably didn't contribute to the bottom line for sure did not improve things.  If you create documents for the purpose of creating documents, that's not work.  It's just an empty paper trail.  It's even worse when you get overly caught up in the paper trail rather than the end goal (which might be a new feature, a new system, etc.)
• Meetings, meetings, meetings.  To go to the meeting, you need the pre-meeting for which, by the way, didn't you get the memo for the post meeting?  Meetings need a clear point, an agenda where an objective should be received by the end of the discussion.  Or worse yet, it shouldn't be an opportunity to simply voice people's complaints.  That's what the bars and coffee breaks are for!  At one point, I had so many meetings that I wouldn't have any time to do my "real" work.  So in the end, I'd have to sacrifice more hours to finish up my normal duties.  I did hear this is a normal situation in Japan, but that doesn't make it right.
• WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE.  I think their peak was something like 1000 people.  They had three main products, but it took 1000 people to support that?  IT had 300 with a huge number of contractors.  That's ridiculous.  Part of me believes that the overhiring practice was simply to outwardly show that they looked like a serious company.  Hey, I'm working on a 14 person team and within 6 weeks, we rebuilt all the front end stuff for our site (120 pages).  Actually of those 14 people, maybe 6-7 people did all the core development work.  And contractors are expensive.  But just because they cost a lot of money doesn't mean that they're worth the price.  And don't forget those contractors are going to milk a former cash cow for as long as they can.
• Letting the vendors manage IT.  Everyone knew it.  But no one did anything about it.  Vendors were better protected than the permanents.  That ain't right.
• Letting people just milk the company.  You occasionally would see people sleeping at their desk (or hear them in the restroom snoring).  But that's not that offensive compared to seeing how many people were overtly sucking money from this company.  I mean, you just showed up to work and you get a paycheck.  How hard is that?  To me for a quite a few people that I saw, they didn't have any mojo and saw the company as a hide out.
• Hiring that CIO.  Oh god.  At least, he's gone.  But the damage was already done.  

I can probably go on for a while just like an Yngwie Malmsteen or John Petrucci solo.  But you get the point.

People might get offended by how I'm saying things, but internally they ought to realize what I'm saying is true.  And if HLIKK was still growing massively, I would eat my words.  But we're looking at things in retrospect with the imminent coming on June 1st.  I still have a few friends that will probably lose their jobs and that's going to suck.  Yet no matter which way you cut it, the place had problems and I'm going to be vocal about it.

Well, maybe the next time they decide to go international, they'll take my words into consideration.  Honestly, all they really needed probably was about 50 people.  But go figure.