Management Information System

  Read the case that you are assigned to and answer 3 open questions at the end of the case. Make reference to the theory studied in class and provide examples to support your opinion. Formalities: • Wordcount: 1000 words • Cover, Table of Contents, References and Appendix are excluded of the total wordcount. • Font: Arial 12,5 pts. • Text alignment: Justified. • The in-text References and the Bibliography have to be in Harvard’s citation style. Submission: Week (7) Via Moodle (Turnitin). Sunday 20th Nov 2022 23:59 CET Weight: This task is a 40% of your total grade for this subject. It assesses the following learning outcomes: • understand what an information system is and its main components; • distinguish between the main types of information systems and innovative methods of reducing costs and improving service through management information systems. • discuss ethical, privacy and security issues related to the use of data and technology in today's business environment. • assess challenges related to (1) the adoption of new technology by employees and customers, and (2) the implementation strategy and processes The Case In October 2016 the British multinational telecommunications company Vodafone achieved an unwelcome milestone - the single biggest fine for “serious and sustained” breaches of consumer protection rules in the UK. It was the result of a troubled CRM and billing consolidation project. UK telecoms regulator Ofcom slapped a £4.6 million fine on Vodafone, payable within 20 working days. The fine was made up of two chunks - £3.7 million for taking pay-as-you-go customers money and not delivering a service in return, and £925,000 for failures relating to the way that the carrier handled complaints. In a checklist of shame the regulator found that:  10,452 pay-as-you-go customers lost out when Vodafone failed to credit their accounts after they paid to ‘top-up’ their mobile phone credit. Those customers collectively lost £150,000 over a 17-month period.  Vodafone failed to act quickly enough to identify or address these problems, only getting its act together after Ofcom intervened.  Vodafone breached Ofcom’s billing rules, because the top-ups that consumers had bought in good faith were not reflected in their credit balances.  Vodafone’s customer service agents were not given sufficiently clear guidance on what constituted a complaint, while its processes were insufficient to ensure that all complaints were appropriately escalated or dealt with in a fair, timely manner.  Vodafone’s procedures failed to ensure that customers were told, in writing, of their right to take an unresolved complaint to a third-party resolution scheme after eight weeks. For its part Vodafone has admitted to the breaches. It has also reimbursed all customers who faced financial loss, but for 30 it could not identify, and made a donation of £100,000 to charity. The events have led to a £54m crash in sales from April to June 2015, and Vodafone said that “continued operational challenges” with the mobile customers’ billing system that was introduced in 2015 had led to the 3.2% drop in sales to £1.55bn due to a customer exodus. Adding the £4.6 million penalty on top of that, we are talking about a £59 million loss without taking the costs of the project itself into account. Timeline of Events 2012 Vodafone first selected the Siebel CRM system back in October 2012, an implementation which was intended not just to service mobile customers, but also customers for fixed-line telecoms, data networking, TV subscriptions and other services. Siebel CRM is a product originally created by Siebel CRM Systems. The company was founded by Thomas Siebel and Patricia House in 1993. At first known mainly for its sales force automation products, the company expanded into the broader CRM market. By the late 1990s, Siebel Systems was the dominant CRM vendor, peaking at 45% market share in 2002. On September 12, 2005, Oracle Corporation announced it had agreed to buy Siebel Systems for $5.8 billion. "Siebel" is now a brand name owned by Oracle Corporation. Vodafone planned to integrate Siebel CRM with Oracle BRM (Billing), Prepaid, Provisioning, ERP, DWH, etc. in order to cover the mission-critical Sales, Service and Marketing operations. It was a hugely ambitious migration and consolidation of billing and CRM systems involving moving more than 28.5 million customer accounts from seven billing platforms to the new system. It was the largest IT project that Vodafone had undertaken, The main business challenges addressed in the context of this project were:  Create a single, centralised, 360 degree Customer View that can be accessed by the various front-end systems and channels.  Achieve more efficient & effective Customer Service, minimising handling time, call transfers and logging incident tickets and service requests.  Empower the Call Center Agent to become a Universal Agent, able to handle any Sales, Service or Marketing related issue.  Use Siebel as the main front-end system at the Contact Center and drastically reduce the use of all other systems at the front-end.  “Keep customers happy” while reducing time and cost to serve.