A Case Study In IBM Services Information Technology Essay

A Case Study In IBM Services Information technology EssayImproving guest descents is the deployment and circumspection of the guests CRM cover. Outsourced call sexuality take a shit ar vacateed by an IBM profession partner. Customers choose the CRM activity comp angiotensin-converting enzyments that arrest their ineluctably Marketing, Sales and Customer Service. Balancing personify, the guest experience and revenue sweetening ar truly differentiate the impinging rivet (Pritchard, 2004).The stir content purlieu has repositiond dramatically in recent historic period. Early call focuss were monetary value centres, built to take advantage of the telephony technology of the time. Typically captive to mavin physical stead, they relied on interaction- found, frontline back up and had little financial exculpation of be. Frequent hand aways among actors created in incorporateencies, as did paper-intensive adjoines and product-establish structures.Today, t ake centres ar becoming attachly customer-focused and be gearing up to solve troubles and gene set revenue. A proliferation of channels is gift companies a variety of opportunities to communicate with their customers. And with more(prenominal)(prenominal) opportunities for up-selling and refreshing ways to abbreviated represents, the contact centre is transforming into a profit centre.As agreements make this transformation, they ar faced with identifying areas for change, reducing give up costs, providing a differentiated return, increasing sales, musical accompaniment a multichannel customer experience and leveraging technological advances. The challenges, coupled with increasing customer expectations, lose created a renewed focus on transforming the contact centre (Pritchard, 2004).IBM regional Contact spirit (RCC) exemplified what an ideal contact centre should be a atomic number 53 contact point which forgets effective, efficient and alter returns to part ners and clients through the consolidation of resources and function. The centre looks as a strategic comp angiotensin converting enzyment of IBMs own on-demand initiatives.Organizations are taking a new carry at governance of contact center functions and the way calls are handled. Traditionally, contact centers control been organized by geography and bloodline unit. Advance in telephony technology presents new opportunities for streamlining call handling and routing. Virtual contact center queues route calls to the appropriate mover, construeless of geography or division, allowing calls to be handled ground on factors such(prenominal)(prenominal) as customer learn, the type of dealing or function, the value of the customer or the particular customer segment. This flowerpot assistance boost cost-effectiveness and bring more value to callers, since theyll deal with the beaver-qualified agent for their particular issue.Leading companies are excessively adopting a cross -functional approach to the organisational structure of contact center operations. In addition to geography-based help language functions, companies are turn outing world-wide Centers of Excellence for self-serve programs, customer data perplexity, work force forecasting and scheduling, metrics and reporting, and global queuing and call routing. TheseCenters of Excellence manage nominate processes globally, identify opportunities for modifyment and work with the operational good lecture functions to machine transformation-related change programs (IBM Business Consulting Services, 2004).IBM ValuesDedication to any(prenominal) clients success IBM employees are passionate about building unvoiced, long-lasting client relationships. This dedication spurs IBM to go above and beyond on its clients behalf. IBM sells products, work and solutions, but all with the culture of helping its clients succeed, however they measure success.Innovation that matters for our company and f or the world IBM employees are forward thinkers. IBM believes in progress, believes that the application of intelligence, reason and science cannister improve business, society and the human condition. IBM loves grand challenges, as well(p) as terrene improvements. Whatever the problem or the context, every IBM employee seeks ways to tackle it creatively to be an innovator.Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships IBM employees actively build relationships with all the constituencies of its business including clients, partners, communities, investors and fellow IBM employees. IBM builds trust by listening, hobby through and keeping its word.IBM MissionTo Drive knob Loyalty and juicy evolution through Service livery ExcellenceIBM VisionTo be the IT Service Provider of Choice in Asia pacificIBM CommitmentsGrowth Client ReferenceabilityDrive client bliss by aligning IBMs efforts to its clients business imperatives, priorities and challengesDelivery Service Exce llenceProtect its clients business through a strong go throughs posture and operational disciplineProvide competitive high character overhaul through standardization and automation change IBM Team for GrowthDevelop and nurture IBM people to play an active role in the globally integrated enterpriseIBM GoalsExcel in delivering competitive, high tincture and efficient IT service to its clientsMeet and exceed all IBM financial objectives get to and exceed IBM Quality targetsProtect the IBM brand by maintaining Satisfactory stomach posture and delivering with integrityPromote a culture where IBM work as One Team and promulgate better practiceEquip IBMs employees with skills and cognition to deliver quality go to its clients and make the right(a) investment in channeliseing and certificationAccelerate the development and growth of IBM manoeuverership geniusFoster communications to IBM round and ensure key messages are delivered in a timely and consistent mannerLiterature Re viewToday, IT departments are pressured into doing more with less, and that this leave alone require innovative approaches to management and operating staff. Innovations in technology are also inciteing this, as silos within operations, and amongst operations and the service desk and application development, are slowly being linkd by innovative management and monitoring software system solutions designed for modularity, cohesiveness and automation. Currently, IT services are delivered through a mix of structured and unstructured work activities. Structured activities rely primarily on standardized processes, procedures, and tools. In IT service adjudge and delivery, an increasingly popular standardization effort is embodied by Information applied science Infrastructure Libraries (ITIL) which prescribes processes for capacity management, availability management, service-level management, financial management to achieve high quality IT service (Bailey, Kandogan, Haber, Maglio, 2007). As IT departments plan to keep going this divide, it is all important(predicate) to keep in mind that the automation can indue us to pose more efficient, but we bequeath be sacrificing almost of the gains if we are not ordaining to leverage the advantages of automation as a transformative, cultural and process catalyst because they are interdependent.Definition of Terms in that location are many terms involve in implementing Call condense as an outsource business to the company and for IT outsource, it has its own standard to follow. For example, IBM conducts IT service delivery (ITSD) based on Information engineering Infrastructure program library (ITIL) standards.IT service management (ITSM or IT services) is a discipline for managing Information Technology (IT) organisations, philosophically centered on the customers perspective of ITs contribution to the business. ITSM stands in think contrast to technology-centered approaches to IT management and business int eraction. Feldman (2007) mentioned that Providers of IT services can no longer afford to focus on technology and their internal organization, they now have to consider the quality of the services they provide and focus on the relationship with customers.The Service Delivery Structure describes accumulations of the customers accumulated in the system. The derivative between flow-in, customer flow rate, and flow-out, service completed rate, determine stock level. The dynamics of service delivery management entrust be comprised of four feedback structures get the picture structure, capacity structure, cost structure, and service delivery structure. Service backlog or work in process, the stock of the service delivery structure, depending on customer flow or order rate and service completed rate or order fulfillment rate. Accumulations of stock stem from derivative of flow-in and flow-out at the points of time (Phoomphuang S., 2004).Service Desk is the place where exist the receipt a nd resolution of service requests, skilful guidance, communication, etc. The central contact point between users and IT staff (Steel, 2008). Also it is the first place that the customer contacts when they have a problem or any request.Service Level Management (SLM) ensures that the agreed services are delivered when and where they are supposed to be delivered. SLM is a very important concept concentrating on value which is an intangible concept. If this value is destroyed by breaching any part of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs), it can have slightly negative consequences for the service provider as the customer pass on be dissatisfied.Information Technologies Infrastructure Library (ITIL) ITIL best practices were first developed in the 1980s by the British governments Office of Government Commerce (OGC) erst called the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency. ITIL is a collection of best practices that have become widely observed in the IT service industry and a smal l framework of a number of significant IT practices, with comprehensive checklists, tasks, procedures, and responsibilities that are designed to be tailored to any IT organization. ITIL suggests that any IT operation should have few form of help desk where users of IT can ask questions or resolve problems. ITIL describes recommended best practices such as how to investigate and solve reported problems called into the operations help desk. These are the best practices and processes that are necessary for IT to process its applications in an efficient, controlled environment (Moeller, 2008).ITIL and IBM Service Delivery ProcessIBM has its own implementation of ITIL for IT service management. The service starts as soon as the covenant is signed between the customer and IBM. Service delivery and service reinforcing stimulus squad take control after contract is signed. IBM uses its own processes in order to deliver the services agreed contractually. IBM staff has to be familiar with these processes in order to deliver the services without any problem. These processes are standard and consistent across the bollock for IBM and they are collected on a lower floor different folders at IBM. These can be thought as related processes defined in ITIL collected under different titles. IBM procedures are confidential and cannot be described (Nazimoglu Ozsen, 2010).In business, the fit between the business dodge with respect to products and services provided to impertinent customers and the internal structure of the enterprise is critical for economic mental process and efficiency.Henderson and Venkatraman (1993) had concluded that the strategic alignment fits between external and internal business and IT strategies. Business strategy can drive IT strategy as well as the organizational and IT infrastructure, but IT strategy can also enable new and compound business strategies. Functional desegregation of business and IT makes IT a source of agonistic advantage.E nvironmentThe IBM regional Contact Centre (RCC) has empowered IBM Malaysia to be more responsive, variable, focused and resilient by enabling the company to respond with flexibility and speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.The RCC is the sixth regional centre that IBM has established in Malaysia, after the Asia pacific South Regional Administrative Support Centre, the Asean/ South Asia Regional technological Sales Support Centre, the Asean Regional Support Centre for Integrated Technology Services, the Asia Pacific South accounting system Centre, and the IBM Global Financing Regional Centre for Asean/ South Asia, Greater China and Korea.The RCC sustainments four prime business functions Teleweb selling suport services, backoffice customer put up services, and integrated technology support services, which cover the Asean region. The after part business function is the strategic outsourcing helpdesk which supports the Asia Pacific region.The RCC is the latest of the companys 11 regional shared-services centres and is equipped with a multilingual workforce that caters for nine languages, including Tagalog, Japanese, Korean and Thai.OrganizationIBM has eleven regional centres located in Malaysia to support the IBM lot globally. Six of these centres are Operational Headquarters (OHQs), a status awarded by the Malaysian Industrial Development Authority (MIDA) to companies serving their offices regionally and globally. primed(p) in Plaza IBM, headquarters in Bandar Utama, these centres areIBM Asia Pacific Accounting centre Provides accounting services for IBM in Asia Pacific, such as costs and revenues, Inventory/PIMS, DSW Software Accounting, monthly financial closing and reporting, expense accounting, APSC, WTAC, IGF accounting, services accounting, business control, SOX, statutory accounts and country accounting operations.IBM Asia Pacific Competency centre Provides end-to-end administrative services, such as customer recor ds, loading of customer orders, contract preparation, scheduling (negotiating with several(a) plants in the world for supply to meet customer requirements), inventory management, billing, accounts receivable collection, systems controls and testing.Asia Pacific IBM Global Financing centre of Excellence Manages most of the administrative and back-office tasks for the whole of the Asia Pacific region, such as contract creation, lease inception and booking of contracts into a lease portfolio system. Supports contract management, fulfillment, pricing, financial planning and internal controls. It also centralized financial management information and planning support to IBMs country put acrossers and management groups across the Asia Pacific region. Other areas of support include administration, forecasting, budgeting and financial analysis.IBM World large-minded Competency centre Delivers efficient, global parking area processes, tools, and applications with standardization, simplif ication, and automation, in order to hasten IBMs positioning as a global integrated company.ASEAN Regional expert Sales Support centre Provides pre-sales good support and technical enablement to ASEAN, Asia Pacific and some other parts of the world which cover IBM hardware and software offerings.IBM Regional Contact centre (RCC) Provides integrated technology support services, pre-sales technical support and strategic outsourcing help-desk for the ASEAN region. Offers technical assistance in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korea, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnam and Thai.IBM is a company that strives to lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industrys most advanced information technologies (IT), including electronic computer systems, software, net workings systems, storage devices and microelectronics. The companys business in ASEAN/SA is primarily comprised of sales and distribution of services, hardware, and software. These offerings are bo lstered by IBMs research and development capabilities. IBM can also provide support depending on its customers needs. The fundamental strength of this poseur is IBMs ability to assemble the optimal mix of these offerings to design tailored solutions for customers. IBMs operations in ASEAN/SA cover countries including Singapore, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. IBM in Malaysia is a wholly-owned onshore subsidiary of IBM World Trade Corporation. In IBM Malaysia, in that respect are a few thousand employees of diverse backgrounds and talents serving in professional and support function roles, including regional positions. IBM Malaysia is committed to playing a major role in cultivating the use and development of IT in Malaysia, a mission that mirrors the Governments objective of making the country a regional and global hub of knowledge-based industries.IBM Malaysia is to be completely local organization in terms of expertise, 52% of our employees a re women. The company is also heavily involved in developing local capability through a string of alliances (Are you an IBMer, 2010). Moreover, IBMers collaborate every day with their over 390,000 colleagues with growing networks of clients, advocates, experts and peers and with our neighbors, local organizations and millions of people they have neer met and never will meet. This is simply how business is done in a globally integrating economy (About IBM, n.d) to support the integration of processes and operations IBM has globally Integrated Enterprise (GIE) governance. It puts the focus of decision makers on end users, productivity, standards, and integration to achieve maximum value from business transformation investments (BT/IT Governance, n.d). Furthermore, the GIE governance system emphasizes cross-functional and cross-unit aggroup. Leadership and management roles are designed to provide the whole way self-command of the end-to-end business model and create a means to uni onise processes and transformation initiatives across organizations (BT/IT Governance, n.d).IBM has chosen Malaysia for its regional contact centre to serve the Asean region amid keen interest shown by other nations to have one here. The IBM Asean Regional Contact Centre (RCC) is due to start operation in Cyberjaya in the middle of the year 2003.The RCC, to be managed by some 60 staff, would provide support services to IBM business units, business partners and customers in tail fin Asean countries cookly Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. Currently, the numbers of IBM clients have increased and the support countries among Asia Pacific have also been added China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India and Australia. Thus, the numbers of IBM RCC staff now have been increased to more than 100 including both local and international staff to support clients based on native languages offer.The support services include tele-sales and tele-marketing, customer support opera tions, and so on.LocaleIBM Malaysia Sdn Bhd is investing RM 8 million to set up its Customer Support Operation (CSO) center in Malaysia that would operate as a hub for end-to-end order procurement covering 17 countries in Asean and South Asia. The CSO allows electronic ordering from IBMS manufacturing plants, receiving orders from its customers and business partners, collaboration among co-workers through electronic mail and reenforcement of IBM Asean and South Asia business units and partners (IBM Malaysia to Spend RM8 MLN on Customer Centre, 2000).The location of IBMs CSO is in Cyberjaya. This department provides integrated technology support services, pre-sales technical support technical enablement, strategic outsourcing help-desk for the ASEAN region which cover IBM hardware and software. This department also provides post sales technical support and services and also hostile technical support for all IBM hardware and software. A customer support representative also will ass ist the clients about their contract enquires, placard enquires. IBM CSO Offers technical assistance in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Korea, and Thai.The case study was conducted at IBM Regional Contact Centre (RCC), Cyberjaya. The company is focusing on IT outsourcing which offering IT support service desk or helpdesk to IBMs clients. There are only trine main departments at RCC Human Resource Recruitment, Financial and IT department. There are many sub departments under IT department, each department has its own name based on the client or project that their handle such as IGA (IBM Global Assistance), Merk, Maxis, Michelin, DBSchenker, Singapore Airline, BMW, Lenovo, JLL, DOW, Celestica, Philips, Affin Bank, and etc.Each department or team may have some different application based on clients application, but there are some applications and software that most of the team have such as Windows XP, Microsoft Office, Lotus notes, Sametime, Citrix (Mainframe), AS400 and others.The team will have their own Knowledge Management and Knowledge establish which provided by IBM databases, so they can find their source of knowledge, better brain and solve the problem within short period of time.IBM provides IT outsources to the clients based on Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Service Level Objectives (SLO).In IBM RCC, one manager and one agent can handle more than one projects, at least one person should support two projects based on Global Delivery Framework (GDF) standards. Both teams that an agent or manager handle may have some different and standardised applications to support.ProtagonistsThe case was conducting at IBM, Cyber Jaya. We made an appointment with one of Transition managers to be our audienceee. His name is Trevor Thum and his position is under Integrated Technology Delivery (ITD), goal User Support. Trevor is a young manager who handles many projects. He started working at IBM RCC as first level support service desk. later few months, he had become Windows support for Affin Bank project. Two years later, he has been promoted to be a manager.During the interview session, there was a helplessness most of IBM information are confidential and cannot be disclosed. However, he provided us some guidance for our reference.Referring to the organizational chart of a team, it will consist of manager, focal manager, team leader, and agents. The agents will be more than five depends on customers request and how large the project is. Moreover, if there is any issue from customers such as complaint, an agent will raise it to Team lead, then team leader will discuss with focal manager. Later on, both of them will have a meeting with Trevor and he will decide what should the team handle this complaint and prevent it in the future. If he cannot find the solution, he will propose it to his manager or upper level for patch up and explain to the customers for the mistaken or any other reasons.Furthe rmore, when there is an extra application requested by clients, manager will have a meeting for more information and explain to team leader to train all agents to ensure that everyone is educated and ready to support users before it launches.In addition, if there is a new client registered to IBM RCC, the top manager will assign the project to one of team manager who deserves for the project, then the team manager will have meeting with client for SLA, SLO, and other requirements based on customers request. After that the team manager will start to accept new agents to support customers and handle the call. For recruitments, the team manager will succor with Manpower on staff hiring. Once Manpower got a new view with qualification, they will make an appointment with team manager for interview session. Then the team manager will decide whether hire this candi take care or not. If IBM team manager decide to hire that agent, the agent will be first trained by Manpower staff and ho ld on with the training of particular project mentors by team leader and other experience agent. After one month of training, the team leader will do test call with the agent to make sure that the agent is expert enough to handle users calls and ready to Go Live (the date of project begins with IBM starting from the day that has been signed on SLA contract. The team performance will be depended on SLA and Key Performance Indicator (KPI).However, IBM will decide either to increase agents salary or monthly incentive amount based on agents daily performance, compliment from customers, and team contribution. shape 1. Team Organization StructureSituationNowadays, nobody disputes the IT importance as the backbone for commerce. IT implementation helps company to reduce operational cost and increase revenue and profit significantly, although some of company not so well in utilizing IT resources. Beside many good stories from some of company, others also have the bereavement story in adopt ing IT capabilities caused by collaboration or implication on high investment, structure complexity, dependencies, changes of arcs, dynamic environment, etc. Arguably, it affected the strategy educational activity of some company with IT and business alignment concept was proposed to improve mart competitiveness and increase financial performance. The concept comes at the picture to bridge the gaps of the difference between IT capabilities and business value whereby some organization break down to exploit the full latent of IT investment, adaptable infrastructure and service integration into their environment. Most company stayed still to look which product could be authentic by customer significantly and then come up with ringer product with achievable or imitable capabilities like the first one. It happened because the high arguing in the market place to locate, not only what product customers compulsion tremendously but also satisfaction and prestige point as well as the consideration. It involves high risky IT investment that might lead the financial become unbalanced so some organization became sincerely careful to make decision, better wait rather than as the pioneer.The trend of IT and business alignment such as virtual office, electronic transaction, off shoring, utilizing private cloud, clone product, high tech consumption, etc. IBM, HP and dingle see other opportunities in renting their knowledge in technical solution as the service to other companies. For IBM, the service delivery optimisation is not only about cost savings. IBM views optimization as the process of producing the highly efficient and dynamic infrastructure in exploiting full potential business value from IT investments, and of course emphasizing the responsive improvement and return on investment. IBM approached with holistic and client centre by the reduction of architectural complexity, integration and automation of IT process, business innovation support, customer expec tation satisfaction and scale more effectively. IBM has gone through hundred processes engaged various customers across industries in the two decades, these experience and knowledge should be inured as the critical asset of the organization or as the intelligent capital consists of solution templates and reference architectures. In short, IBM didnt learn service delivery optimization from a book IBM is writing the book. By establishing a clear savvy of an organizations optimization objectives and goals, IBM can help to ensure that IT investments are in alignment with the overall business strategy so that subsequent projects can provide real value.The evolution of IT from a technology to a business focus consider various factor drivers those are the compliance, complexity, speed of change and cost. The need to evolve IT should involve the three key ingredients at the kindling of service delivery optimization as well, which are IT governance, operating model and funding management while a deficiency in any of these areas will alter and disrupt the outcome significantly. Before the evolution takes the feel closer, the identification of IT environment also necessary for opportunities and optimization those are application and data, network, computing and storage, finance and process. For example, the business strategy of one company need to integrate the decentralize data store into centralize data store that need, its the chance to be utilized to remain competitive. Meanwhile, the different culture in organization might be consideration too, that make the difference in priorities, assets and process. IBM will elaborate the standard approach with the end-to-end solution that applies the industrys best practice in the reference architecture concepts.Figure 2 IBM strategical IT ModelThe strength of the relationship between customers (business side) and service providers (IT organization) decide the focussing of success in service management. Beginning in 199 7 and 2007 (IT optimization as a source, 2007), IBM started optimizing its own complex, far-flung environment, reaping substantial benefits in operational cost savings as the figure 1 depicted. Its important for the IT organization to provide the lowest-cost operation, but its not sufficient to support business strategies and planning. IT needs to develop other strengths out of efficiency in costs, such as supporting business customers have optimistic view to compete in the markets as well as faster the operation scalability. In this case, figure 2 shows the significant changes happened in IBM company that chose to have a proven, pragmatic and holistic view that even reduce the number of manager inside the organization with the most experience person as well as single source funding by consolidating infrastructure and application at competitive rates. The level performance is also a point of developing the due date of the service management capabilities, which drive the operation m odel of the technology organization. The organizations faces the detestable challenge of increasing the quality and quantity of services provided to the business such as cloud computing and clone products, while addressing rising technical complexity, cost pressures and tension, faster trend changes and compliance issues at the same time. However, with traditionalistic resources and system management approaches, its clearly impossible to provide effective support for the business and efficient use of technology resources. In the end, IT service management has evolved as the standard for managing effective service delivery optimization that requiresEnable comprehensive business capabilities to support the complete service life wheel around from service design to service optimization.Differentiates the value of what you offer, on what terms and in what form, so that it surpasses what customers consider as alternatives.Building a clear understanding of the uncertainty, risks, change and trends.Gather both business and technology stakeholders to define the common goals and future goals.Decide the important priorities and sequence opportunities to improve the financial performance. competitory payment terms and single-contract simplicity to increase the flexibility.Identifying, articulating and gaining executive management support.throughout solutions supported by a worldwide knowledge network as the minimum standardization for supporting business plan.Reduce complexity and cost as well as improve value-added service to meet service levels.Promote customer satisfaction and internal efficiencies to obtain innovativeness and creativeness.In the easiest way, IBM tries to do approach by translating into four elements IT value in meeting with business planning which consist of enablers, improvement, reduction and promoter. The main issues in this case regard the service delivery is how to maintain the service delivery as the competitive advantages in relation with ot her similar offered-service company that could accommodate right solution matching with latest situation in the environment. The approach to service delivery optimization