Business intelligence strategy a practical guide for achieving bi excellence

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 earlier days, Information technology was used for supporting information resources of an organization, particularly to support management decision making by delivering information when and where it was needed. However at present, the new initiatives of an organization requires significant amount of well-coordinated business and IT executive leadership (Applegate, Austin & McFarlan, 2003).

So the emergence of IT as a key player in decision making of organization’s new initiatives has brought the architecture of IT into focus. Now IT is no more a back office to support business, IT has to pitch in and make mission critical decisions for strategic and tactical initiatives which can improve the company’s growth prospects. This makes the enterprise architecture role far more critical as it has to support not only company’s brand but also help in its elevation further.

Decentralized IT at RR Communications is not delivering the desired results. Ross Roman wants customer experience to be improved and four key units of company Internet, Mobile, landline and Cable TV to work together and help grow the company’s brand and fortune. Case study presents the issues existing at RR communications, and steps to take to turn decentralized IT into a centralized one which can help further achieve desired results at RR communications.

RR Communications

RR communications is a major player in telecommunications industry with multiple medium of services offered by 4 different units. Each unit has its software and hardware infrastructure. So, the idea of running 4 different entities within a single company is leading to lower customer satisfaction as multiple bills are generated for different services subscribed by the same consumer.

The gradual shift in engagement of IT in general at various levels of business initiatives and maturity of IT over the period of time has helped IT to move into centralized mode of operation. This evolution from decentralized mode to centralized mode is helping organizations to grow manifold in business and also giving greater control on software and hardware infrastructure (King, 1983).

RR communications Boss Ross Roman has hired Vince Patton to fix the incumbent issues and help grow company’s dwindling fortune. Vince Patton, who is a veteran IT leader is overwhelmed with the incumbent issues and also attitude of DIO’s of 4 units, who are so averse to change the mode of company’s operation. So the immediate task at hand is to fix company’s burning issue of making 4 different units of company work together. Any major issue in an organization can be resolved by framing a stringent strategy which can not only help mitigate past and present issues but also propel company’s future growth prospects (Smith, Mckeen & Singh, 2012).

Advantages of a single customer service center for RR Communications:

Few benefits post implementation of single shared customer service are listed below.

1. Uniformity of activities: Upon centralization, the activities of a particular functionality will be controlled by one dedicated group. This will result in uniformity of activities. For instance in RR’s case, post implementation of single system, when a customer places a call to customer service center regarding status of any of the four services offered by RR , a representative can answer effectively about the current status and also a single bill can be generated for multiple services offered, since data is shared in a single system.

2. No duplication of work: Centralized will lead to the uniformity and there is no chance for the duplication of work with centralization.

3. Quick decision: For taking advantage of rare opportunities coming in the way, it is necessary that decision should be quickly taken lest the opportunity so available may be slipped away. Centralized office organization helps in such a quick decision.

4. Greater flexibility: During the emergency situations, this will help to make better decisions and be able to take consensus from the most people at once in the organization.

5. Facility for personnel leadership: There is absolutely no doubt that the centralized Office organization helps in establishing a personnel leadership which may even be able to convert a losing business house into a profitable one because of strong, efficient, purposeful and non-controversial central leadership. In this case, the issue with DIO’s non-competence can be resolved once forever, if right people are chosen in leadership roles.

6. Effective control: Uniformity in activities, specialization and standardization facilitates greater degree or supervision, effective co-ordination, self and departmental integration and thus ensure effective control.

Implementation Strategy

The incumbent decentralized model is not helping to meet Ross’s business ambition and Vince’s IT design. Hence the need for a centralized model is clearly required in this case to meet enterprise needs. Following barriers are observed in current model which is causing hindrance to both IT and business’s needs (McSweeney, 2010).

· Lack of common governing structure for enterprise wide initiatives.

· Inadequate enterprise wide funding model(s).

· Poorly integrated application processes across multiple units

· Poorly designed business strategies.

· Unbalanced strategic and tactical initiatives.

· Minimal coordination and lack of data sharing among various units.

· Lack of consensus for integration of services.

Clearly a shared customer service center is required to overcome the existing challenges at RR communications. Also to create this system’s consensus among all the key stakeholders is very much required. Vince made a smart move by involving senior IT managers in both business and IT areas across all units. These Managers have a solid understanding of the functionality of respective units from functional and technical perspective (Boyer, 2010).

So Vince have a great chance to negotiate and convince divisional presidents for an enterprise architecture and a single governing body. They know what Vince is capable of doing with their positions if they resist his initiatives. On other hand, to make the implementation of enterprise architecture for a shared customer service center seamless, Vince can offer all presidents leadership roles in steering committee, which can take calls regarding budget allocations for corporate initiatives. In this way, they will still have authority to get funds allocated for their own divisions but implementation will be done under guidance of Enterprise architecture. Basically it will be a win-win situation to both Vince and also divisional presidents from IT and business perspective.

Enterprise Architecture (EA)

The new implementation strategy under the umbrella of EA group will perform following (McSweeney, 2010) to create a new shared customer service center with support of all stakeholders (presidents).

· Enterprise architecture strives to achieve common language between business and IT.

· Provides fundamental process structure for an IT strategy.

· Provides strategic context for evolution of enterprise IT systems in response to constantly changing needs of business environment.

· EA is designed to ensure alignment between business and IT strategies, operating model, guiding principles and service delivery.

· EA is integrated with other strategic planning disciplines such as project and application portfolio and management.

· EA ensures the long-term vision of business is preserved as the enterprise builds new business capabilities and improves on old ones.

Trainings all IT resources about new implementation strategy will bring them up to the speed and will help in the evolution of new process smoothly.

Centralized vs decentralized IT

Incumbent IT at RR communications is decentralized and is not flexible enough to support company’s new products effectively. Decentralization helps in maintaining IT systems in smaller units but it has got its own problems. Following are few of them (King, 1983).

· If decision making authority of decentralized unit is inadequate in competence, it would have harmful effects on organization which is evident in RR Communication’s case.

· Decentralization becomes uneconomic and unwieldy unless the organization is large and strong enough at the top to cope with a decentralized structure.

· In situations of emergency or trouble, decentralized administration is ineffective. It is costly and time consuming to control an emergency situation.

· If it is not possible to break up the business suitably into profit centers or investment centers, then decentralization may result in inadequate appraisal and control.

In summary, the current decentralized model in place at RR communications is not helping to achieve enterprise vision.

Centralized IT on other hand if implemented effectively can result in single customer service center in RR communications which in turn can help company in many

Ways (Zabojnik, 2002).

Issues at RR Communications

RR Communications is a well-established player in telecommunications industry which has multiple units to support its business, but lack of cooperation among the different operational units is not helping in growth of the company. Also lack of common shared system is resulting in generation of multiple bills for a single customer for services availed and resulting in low customer satisfaction (Robertson, 2005). Following is the synopsis of the existing issues at RR communications.

· Decentralized IT is neither resulting in enriched customer experience nor in introduction of new products which company is aiming for.

· RR Communications boss Ross thinks, the IT is not flexible and responsive to organization’s needs.

· New executive VP Vince Patton, is overwhelmed with the incumbent issues at RR and also appalled by 4 DIO’s attitude towards him.

· DIO’s of 4 RR’s divisions are not open to idea of integrating operations from 4 units into a single shared entity rendering services to customers.

· Also all four DIO’s extends support to their respective presidents only though Vince Patton is an executive VP, he does not enjoy same support.

· All DIO’s who are averse to idea of integration were actually spending lot of money on testing their products which could be easily cut down if services from all 4 divisions are integrated.

· Hughes and Dawes tried to implement new CRM software to go against Vince’s new architecture, but they were over powered by not granting access to company’s hardware.

· Phil Cooper, President of Internet Services was not convinced that unit specific projects will not get implemented if a steering committee has to oversee them.

· DIO’s opposed Vince’s idea of outsourcing some of the company’s services as they were apprehensive of losing power over their own respective divisions.

· Business has their own apprehensions of integrating customer’s data as part of new single shared system. They do not want customer’s data to be messed up.

Governance Mechanisms

Implementation of EA architecture at RR communication facilitates the need of Business and IT’s involvement at different levels as part of governing body to ensure common customer data and a shared customer service center. The levels can be categorized as below.

1. Strategic: senior executives and IT groups will set the overall architecture and strategy to align with the final business objectives and these also will set the standards for deviation.

2. Tactical: Member of this group tends to be more from IT ranks, including architects, analysts and managers. They typically work across lines of business as well as within lines of business with responsibility for execution of strategy. A key role is provision of architecture consulting services to project teams.

Key Metrics

Following metrics will be useful for governance mechanisms at RR communications (Jessica, n.d.).

1. Effectiveness metrics (qualitative): This metric is connected to business outcomes which measure if team is working on right things. Eg: IT cost per function (Internet).

2. Efficiency metrics (quantitative): This metric measure how well IT is operating. Trend analysis is key in this case. Eg: 1. Services (biz continuity, outsourced function) 2. People (FTE, Staff Augmentation), cost per hour metrics, staffing trends.

Conclusion

The incumbent decentralized IT model has failed RR communication from both business and IT standpoint. The new implementation strategy(EA) for a shared customer service center will help resolve lot of existing issues and also offer the flexibility to sell products faster to customers, along with providing ability for a customer to place a call to get to know status of any offered product(s) and service(s) at RR. IT and business can be part of new governing body to see new initiatives rolled out without any major hassle(s) from any particular unit’s stand point.

References

Applegate, L.M, Austin, R.D, McFarlan, F.W (2003). Corporate information strategy and management: text and cases, ISBN: 0-07-245672-8, McGraw-Hil, Inc.

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

King, J.L (1983). Centralized versus decentralized computing: organizational considerations and management options, v.15, Issue No.4, pp 319-349, ACM, Newyork, NY.

McSweeney, A (2010), Maximising The Value and Benefits of Enterprise Architecture[Online]

Available from computer source database at

http://www.slideshare.net/alanmcsweeney/maximising-the-value-and-benefits-of-enterprise-architecture-6031712

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). Developing IT strategy for Business Value, 2nd edition, pp. 49-58, Prentice Hall.

Twentyman Jessica (n,d). Centralised IT can help maintain quality[Online]

Available from computer source database at http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Centralised-IT-can-help-maintain-quality

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