Uilding Shared Services at Rr Communications

Building Shared Services at RR Communications Mini-Case

SUMMARY

Ross Roman (founder of RR) wants Vince Patton (executive VP of IT) to transform RR’s IT so that they will be more flexible, more responsive, and able to introduce new products to the market more quickly. Ross also finds it unacceptable that RR cannot generate just one bill per customer. Previously, each line of business (internet, mobile, landline, and cable) had its own divisional units for IT. There were multiple sets of hardware, sales systems, databases, and customer service centers. Business unit leaders were rewarded based on the performance of their divisions only and as such did not care about RR’s overall objectives. Vince’s vision is to centralize IT into one enterprise-wide solution, not only to achieve Ross’ goals but also to correct potential legal issues (i.e. missing legally entitled information for software vendors, telecom regulators, and customers). The divisional CIOs had been attempting to undermine and sabotage this vision as they were afraid of losing power as well as increased bureaucracy. Because of their incessant efforts to stonewall Vince and maintain the old corporate culture, he had to fire them all. So far Vince has managed to redesign the entire company’s computer infrastructure to a standardized platform, centralize the purchasing budget, create an enterprise architecture, and orchestrate the generation of a steering committee to ensure that no projects outside of his vision or business objectives are implemented. His next goal is to centralize the data and create a single customer service center to be shared by all the divisions.

QUESTION 1

Having a single customer service center (CSC) for RR communications would bring with it the following advantages:

* Reduced process/system redundancies and duplication of data

* Consolidated operations would reduce costs

* The customer-centric focus of a shared service improves service

* Uniform and...