Building shared services at rr communications case study

Rephrase

Running head: BUILDING SHARED SERVICES AT RR COMMUNICATIONS 1

BUILDING SHARED SERVICES AT RR COMMUNICATIONS 10

Building Shared Services at RR Communications

Wilmington University

Abstract

In the real world, organizations are in complicated and nuance situation to choose IT centralization or decentralization. Technology these days developed into different domains and business lines. Like many other communications, RR communication also has different business lines such as cable TV, internet etc. Each of these units have a tendency to work individually bringing on a divided perspective to the outside world. As the customer services are increasing by different upcoming organizations, there is a decreased demand with the RR communications; this also decreased the demand in the market places. The main goal of this case study is to conclude the reasons for the diminishing demand of RR communication.

1. List the advantages of a single customer service center for RR Communications.

As the IT systems at RR Communications fragmented into different domains like Internet, Landline and Cable TV services. Each individual unit provides individual customer service but not in an efficient way, which reduces the demand in market places.

There are some advantages of a single customer service center for RR Communication regardless of business is as follows:

· Elimination of duplicates results in storage saving and delivery value for less costs:

Each business units maintains separate database which could be redundant. For instance, a customer may use both mobile and internet plan of RR communication, were the data is maintained in separate databases of a single customer this leads to unwanted wastage of memory. Eliminating of such process and combining of different plans of customer can increase the efficiency (“Why do you need a Single Customer View?,” 2014).

· Reduce complexity and infrastructure costs in order to ensure quality and accuracy:

Instead of running multiple customer service centers it is better to maintain single customer service center so as to minimize the infrastructure cost and maintaining online services which will improve the customer satisfaction in a simplified way.

· Improve operational effectiveness and increase flexibility:

Single customer service centers can manage number of customers (David, 2014). The effectiveness of RR communication can increase by consolidating all the data of the customers which also reduces the employee costs and increases the flexibility of RR communications.

· Reducing the uses of time and training costs:

Maintaining single customer service center would help the RR communications to train their staff at a time with knowledge in multiple business plans, this way of teaching may reduce the training cost and time (David, 2014).

· Maintain customer satisfaction and customer experience:

If a customer is subscribing to multiple plans like mobile, internet, cable TV services, then it is better to consolidate all business plans and maintain a single customer service center so that customer can feel comfortable in using all the services from a single platform and it can also ease them for billing or complaining (“Why do you need a Single Customer View?,” 2014).

· Increase in management and data portability:

Using of single platform, data is stored in same format for different business plans which helps the business management to handle the information easily and data analytics tools to provide good insight for managing the data.

2. Devise an implementation strategy that would guarantee the support of the Divisional Presidents for Shared Customer Service Center

It is important to change the perception of president about the consolidation of data and business before implementation. I use the three way approach. It will set positive tone for the idea. They are as follows:

Financial

· Saving the resources from the divisions which would have gone in the form of audits.

· With all the data available at one place it is easy to find new business opportunities by applying different marketing strategies to create extra revenue (Andersen & McNair, 2000).

· IT specific costs can be reduced by the single central authority leading to reduction in costs related to maintenance of hardware in the divisional level (Norton & Kaplan, 2006).

Risk mitigation

· By having all the data at the central authority will have same architecture and policies, which can be reviewed time to time. Through all these the rate of breaches can be reduced.

· A common framework is used to place the information of the customer service center that the information placed is more legal and accountable

Regulatory compliance

· Enterprise architecture helps in streamline the processes for regulatory compliance. Having all the services at a single center will ensure best practices.

· Testing the new systems would cost less and developing compliance is the key metric.

· Better focus can be achieved by all the data at one place and the organization in whole can benefit with production hit.

· If all the duties at one place, can reduce the number of people involved in a single task. When compared to more people involved in divisional centers (Andersen& McNair, 2000).

Once the advantages are outlined, a vision exercise would take place to see any flaws and understanding the divisions about how they fit into the process. The major goal is letting everyone know about the stake holding and any further initiatives require documentation and training. After the understanding of the vision statement, it is important to draft a document of how it applies to information sharing and its effects (Norton & Kaplan, 2006). This will bring business and IT closer making them shared and communicated. By doing this new opportunities can be explored for example out sourcing, means all the service requests can be processed from a single center. Customer satisfaction can be achieved by this process. Stake will be available to all divisions and everyone in the organization.

All the vision requirements are gathered and a gap analysis is performed to make the vision a reality.

3. Is it possible to achieve an enterprise vision with a decentralized IT function?

Decentralization is defined as decision making power is given to the lower levels of the organization. In this current scenarios, it is extremely difficult for an organization to develop at a fast pace with a decentralized IT division. It is the age of information and the businesses that is able to extract the knowledge out of it are able to sustain the market pressures (Boyer, 2010). On the other hand, to have the meaningful conclusion utilizing the incomprehensible volume of accessible information, a centralized repository is needed this can be acknowledged by executing a centralized IT function.

However, the flexibility should not be restricted to the individual business lines to decide which are more beneficial than other in centralization. The only purpose of this to estimate the spending as a whole (Padilla, 2005). This would permit the organization to better put resources into undertaking projects which can drive through the development of entire organization. However, certain decision making and responsibility can even have distributed to accomplish faster customer service (Zabojnik, 2002).

4. What business and IT problems can be caused by lack of common information and enterprise IM strategy?

it is evident from the case study that, individual quarterly results are the main focus for the divisional presidents at RR Communications, they did not drive out the enterprise. This is the most serious issue confronted by the organization where there is a lack of common information management strategy.

Too much decentralization can have extreme effects on the implementation of proper accountability. Every decision can accuse the other for poor state of organization (Robertson, 2005). Additionally, it turns out to be problematic to make an educated choice with respect to controlling the organization in a particular direction.

It is hard for a company to serve its customers in situations where no basic data is available. For instance, customer needs to visit two different departments of the same business, when the two lines are handled are isolated from each other. Due to the lack of co-ordination there is a cost overrun in managing projects, this makes it problematic for the organization to take off new products (Robertson, 2005). This was also noted by the founder of RR Communication Ross Roman when he spoke about the multiple bills issued by the same business to one customer.

5. What governance mechanism need to be put in place to ensure common customer data and a share customer service center? What metrics might be useful?

The immediate action that RR communications needs is to collect data from all business divisions and to implement a process, that can store all these data together. The best approach to get over this issue is by using central repository and it is mandatory to store all the classified data of business divisions to this central repository, later a report is made to handover to the higher administration (Brown, 2012). The data that is stored in the central repository can also be used by other business divisions in order to estimate the changing business trends in order to implement the ideas for business.

A group IT Committee should be built up where proposition would be conveyed to new activities and projects. The committee has to decide on what basis the projects should get the approval to better understand the idea behind the shared customer service center.

In order to judge the customer satisfaction, number of complaints, growth of customers a performance metrics need to be developed, and the results from these metrics can be used for further development of shared customer service center.

Conclusion

In order for the RR communication to achieve the goals. It should consider to integrate all its distributed data that can give better solution to the issues faced.

Each division should have the capacity to contribute towards the general point of the organization and it is of most astounding significance to concentrate on customer satisfaction since customers are the income engines in the competitive communication industry.

The shared customer administration and one-IT activity would help RR communications serve their customers in an improved way and also help them to expand their business sector.

In any case, sufficient activity should provide to individual business units to make their own decision which assist them to survive in the tough business areas.

RR communication should also need to focus on the continuous change process in order for coping the business with the changing IT capabilities. This would empower them to react to market changes in a faster way.

References

Andersen, L., & McNair, C. (2000). Implementing Shared Services Centers. Retrieved April 29, 2016, from http://www.imanet.org/docs/default-source/thought_leadership/operations-process-management-innovation/implementing_shared_service_centers.pdf?sfvrsn=2

Brown, S. (2012, January 10). Top Tips for Successful Shared Services Governance. Retrieved April 29, 2016, from http://www.ssonetwork.com/business-process-outsourcing/articles/top-tips-for-successful-shared-services-governance/

Boyer, J. (2010). Business Intelligence Strategy: A Practical Guide for Achieving BI Excellence. Mc Press.

David, M. (2014, July 17). What are the main advantages of achieving a single customer view? Retrieved April 29, 2016, from https://econsultancy.com/blog/65199-what-are-the-main-advantages-of-achieving-a-single-customer-view/

David P. Norton, & Robert S. Kaplan. (2006, March 01). How to Implement a New Strategy Without Disrupting Your Organization. Retrieved April 29, 2016, from https://hbr.org/2006/03/how-to-implement-a-new-strategy-without-disrupting-your-organization

Padilla, R. (2005, September 2). Is the best IT model the centralized or decentralized approach? - TechRepublic. Retrieved April 29, 2016, from http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-decision-maker/is-the-best-it-model-the-centralized-or-decentralized-approach/

Robertson, J. (2005, November 1). 10 principles of effective information management. Retrieved April 29, 2016, from http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_effectiveim/

Smith, H.A, Mckeen, J.D, Singh, S (2012). IT strategy for Business Value, 2nd edition, pp. 49-58, Prentice Hall.Developing

Why do you need a Single Customer View? (2014, April 24). Retrieved April 29, 2016, from http://www.uniserv.com/en/company/blog/detail/article/why-do-you-need-a-single-customer-view/

Zabojnik, J (2002), Centralized and Decentralized Decision Making in Organizations, v.20, Issue No. 1, pp. 1-22, The University of Chicago