Technology Management Plan

Introduction

You have been selected to be the acting CIO for a subsidiary of Largo Corporation called Rustic Americana. Its primary products include arts and crafts that reflect the history, geography, folklore and cultural heritage of the United States. It specializes in direct marketing and sales through its call center. Sales are through a web store, a brick and mortar store, and a direct mail catalogue. All services are housed under one roof that include warehousing, order fulfillment, shipping, corporate management and operations, and the call center. The success of the company hinges on its eye-catching direct mail catalogue and the unique product line.

Unfortunately, annual sales have declined over the years due largely due to internal issues. The previous CIO was terminated some say due to incompetence primarily related to the underperforming call center. In addition, speculation swirled around the activities of the CIO. He was often absent from the building. He secluded himself behind the closed door of his office. Associated rumors mounted, and it was believed that he was running a consulting business on company time. When the Rustic Americana CEO asked him about this during a formal review, the CIO answered that it was a weekend hobby that kept him abreast of emerging technologies. The CEO asked him if one of their competitors was a client and he vehemently denied the accusation. She was certain that the CIO was not being entirely truthful with her.

Call Center Operations

Managing a call center demands a wide range of skills including managerial, troubleshooting, patience and being cool under pressure. Knowledge of computer and communications skills is helpful but most call centers have a technical support division. The call center manager is Prisha Khan – she has been in the job for about 2 months.

The customer service representative (CSR) in the call center responds to a call for product. On the customer management system (CMS), the CSR collects and directly enters customer information; on a separate inventory management system (IMS), the CSR looks up the product, and verifies if the warehouse has it in stock. If it does, the order is entered on the CMS, and the CSR decreases the inventory on the IMS. On the CMS, the CSR creates an order fulfillment ticket that is automatically shuttled to the warehouse processing clerk who prints it and then generates the shipping label. The shipping label is prepared through a web-based system through either UPS or USPS, which also produces a tracking number used by both the company and the customer. The processing clerk enters the shipping costs and tracking number into the CMS. The customer is billed when the order ships.

The warehouse crew uses bar code scanners to track merchandise; once the order is selected, it moves along a conveyor to a shipping clerk who packages the order, affixes the shipping label, scans the bar code, and places the package into a bin for delivery pick-up. The final scan automatically enters the dollar amounts into the system for billing.

An old UNIX system is used to manage inventory. Data input clerks entered information on new merchandise into it, CSRs referred to it for product data, and if the product was on hand, it produced an order processing form which was sent to the warehouse for processing. The CSR could reduce the inventory through the terminal on their desk. The problem they experienced was a refresh rate on volatile inventory. It was a common occurrence that a customer would be told the product would ship when it was in fact depleted by other CSRs.

There were conflicting views on the party responsible for upgrading the systems. The former CIO believed the call center manager needed to take the lead on upgrading operations, while the call center manager complained that this was an IT problem and she could not tolerate downtime. To add to the fray, the Chief Financial Officer balked at the cost associated with this investment. The CEO did not feel the urgency and leaned to the CFO for advice.

Staffing the call center is the responsibility of the call center manager. Ms. Khan uses past volume experience to make sure there were sufficient CSRs on hand. She kept a list of “on-call” CSRs for unanticipated business. Her staffing limit was the number of stations with computer access to the servers. The call center uses a Cisco Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system. The phone system runs on two standalone servers — one for call routing and the other for voicemail. There is a dedicated toll free number into the center, and the system is programmed with an auto-attendant to direct calls. The volume of calls is a problem, and the number of lines is less than the number of agents available to take calls during high volume periods. This is because there is a per-trunk monthly service charge and the call center cannot adjust the number of trunks based on periodic demand. When the caller is placed in queue, the standard practice is to limit the length of the average call to six rings. The phone system requires a local coaxial cable Internet service to supply broadband. Phones are connected to the network architecture using standard Cat5 copper cabling which routes phone traffic to the call center.

Under this approach, there have been issues with “quality of service.” The former CIO was fond of saying “problems with the cable company” when things went wrong. There was no effort to track downtime. During these “downtimes” the entire call center becomes idle and revenue is lost. Because the Internet is tied to the same cable service, web services were also down. The Rustic Americana CEO felt that the lack of access discouraged new customers, but no data was collected to indicate a correlation between downtimes and sales decline.

Inside the building there is an application server, a server for Microsoft Outlook email, the web server, and the typical complement of routers and switches. The former CIO used a variety of hardware from different vendors. When broadband cable services are up, bandwidth is not a problem, except when the former CIO allowed employees to stream movies during their breaks to boost morale. Employees routinely used their workstations to check personal email, and to manage their social networking accounts. There was a problem with one employee posting unflattering comments about the company that resulted in a severe reprimand.

The data systems for the call center are setup as follows. The center has two data servers. One data server has a UNIX operating system, and it runs Oracle database technology. The second server is a Microsoft operating system, and it runs SQL database technology. The two data servers are accessed via 40 workstations in the call center. It is staffed 24/7 but is closed on major holidays. The call center also contains 10 additional older workstations, which are used by data input clerks to update inventory when ordered and upon arrival this inventory was verified and bar code tagged with local stock inventory labels.
CSRs use a “homegrown” customer support application developed in house which uses a generic Oracle Forms interface. The former CIO did not believe in “bells and whistles” of modern Customer Resource Management (CRM) systems — besides, the Director of Marketing did not understand the value of CRM, the CFO was not persuaded to make the software and hardware investments, and the Rustic Americana CEO held stereotypical, non-strategic views of customers. The inability to do their required work was a constant complaint of agents. Moreover, there is no technology infrastructure in place to support mobile computing such as staff use of tablets or (more critical) a wireless interface on bar code scanners used in the warehouse.

Your Role as Acting CIO

You should frame your work around understanding the mechanics of enterprise technology management beyond the need to specifically recommend the replacement of antiquated yet functional systems. You should strive for an alignment of technology with the business needs.

You have been asked by the Corporate CEO to fix the problems created by the former CIO’s perceived mismanagement of the IT operations and resources. In particular, you need to address the numerous complaints about the call center regarding its poor service such as delayed shipping and failure to notify when a product is out of stock.

The CEO asked that a plan be prepared and presented for effectively managing the company’s IT operations – specifically its call center. Within Rustic Americana, there is a Chief Financial Officer, a Director of Marketing, a Direct Sales Director and the usual departments. You are the “acting” CIO, and as such, you have your own staff of ten which includes an assistant who handles staff management and equipment orders, a network engineer for each of the three critical systems, a systems analyst, a web server programmer, and four desktop support technicians.

This learning activity focuses what it takes to manage technical operations. You will learn about creating reliable feedback mechanisms for difficulties at all levels of enterprise Information Technology interface. This includes timely discovery of technology related issues, resolution of these issues, creating a culture of trust and dependence, informing staff of your activities, and developing strategic plans for reducing bottlenecks in the future.

Understanding technology management is important to an IT professional because in this environment, as would be true of most corporate environments, computer-based information systems are at the core of an efficient and competitive service delivery. Effective leadership requires the identification of problems, the resolution of those problems, an eye on the future of the corporation and its profit, and transparency through communication with peers and subordinates.

Steps to Completion

1) Analyze the Situation

First review and analyze the business and IT operations of the call center. Break down the entire process into smaller parts and analyze these parts. If necessary draw a sketch.

In general, here are some typical questions one should consider as part of the analysis:

What is the business model for the corporation?
Where is technology strong? Where is it weak?
How do we manage capacity both in terms of our computer system’s capacity (and response time and fault tolerance) and our staffing capacity (does the work performed full occupy the expertise for which it is paid?).
What is our sustainability policy?
What is our technology innovation strategy?
What is our level of contract support? How are contracts evaluated for their full value to the efficiency of the corporation?
How are problems solved within the corporation?

Compelling correspondence is essential to the achievement all things considered but since of the changing idea of the present working environments, successful correspondence turns out to be more troublesome, and because of the numerous impediments that will permit beneficiaries to acknowledge the plan of the sender It is restricted. Misguided judgments.In spite of the fact that correspondence inside the association is rarely completely open, numerous straightforward arrangements can be executed to advance the effect of these hindrances.

Concerning specific contextual analysis, two significant correspondence standards, correspondence channel determination and commotion are self-evident. This course presents the standards of correspondence, the act of general correspondence, and different speculations to all the more likely comprehend the correspondence exchanges experienced in regular daily existence. The standards and practices that you learn in this course give the premise to additionally learning and correspondence.

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This course starts with an outline of the correspondence cycle, the method of reasoning and hypothesis. In resulting modules of the course, we will look at explicit use of relational connections in close to home and expert life. These incorporate relational correspondence, bunch correspondence and dynamic, authoritative correspondence in the work environment or relational correspondence. Rule of Business Communication In request to make correspondence viable, it is important to follow a few rules and standards. Seven of them are fundamental and applicable, and these are clear, finished, brief, obliging, right, thought to be, concrete. These standards are frequently called 7C for business correspondence. The subtleties of these correspondence standards are examined underneath: Politeness Principle: When conveying, we should build up a cordial relationship with every individual who sends data to us.

To be inviting and polite is indistinguishable, and politeness requires an insightful and amicable activity against others. Axioms are notable that gracious “pay of graciousness is the main thing to win everything”. Correspondence staff ought to consistently remember this. The accompanying standards may assist with improving courtesy:Preliminary considering correspondence with family All glad families have the mystery of progress. This achievement originates from a strong establishment of closeness and closeness. Indeed, through private correspondence these cozy family connections become all the more intently. Correspondence is the foundation of different affiliations, building solid partners of obedient devotion, improving family way of life, and assisting with accomplishing satisfaction (Gosche, p. 1). In any case, so as to keep up an amicable relationship, a few families experienced tumultuous encounters. Correspondence in the family is an intricate and alluring marvel. Correspondence between families isn’t restricted to single messages between families or verbal correspondence.

It is a unique cycle that oversees force, closeness and limits, cohesiveness and flexibility of route frameworks, and makes pictures, topics, stories, ceremonies, rules, jobs, making implications, making a feeling of family life An intelligent cycle that makes a model. This model has passed ages. Notwithstanding the view as a family and family automatic framework, one of the greatest exploration establishments in between family correspondence centers around a family correspondence model. Family correspondence model (FCP) hypothesis clarifies why families impart in their own specific manner dependent on one another ‘s psychological direction. Early FCP research established in media research is keen on how families handle broad communications data. Family correspondence was perceived as an exceptional scholastic exploration field by the National Communications Association in 1989. Family correspondence researchers were at first impacted by family research, social brain science, and relational hypothesis, before long built up the hypothesis and began research in a family framework zeroed in on a significant job. Until 2001, the primary issue of the Family Communication Research Journal, Family Communication Magazine, was given. Family correspondence is more than the field of correspondence analysts in the family. Examination on family correspondence is normally done by individuals in brain science, humanism, and family research, to give some examples models. However, as the popular family correspondence researcher Leslie Baxter stated, it is the focal point of this intelligent semantic creation measure making the grant of family correspondence special. In the field of in-home correspondence, correspondence is normally not founded on autonomous messages from one sender to one beneficiary, yet dependent on the dynamic interdependency of data shared among families It is conceptualized. The focal point of this methodology is on the shared trait of semantic development inside family frameworks. As such, producing doesn’t happen in vacuum, however it happens in a wide scope of ages and social exchange.

Standards are rules end up being followed when performing work to agree to a given objective. Hierarchical achievement relies significantly upon compelling correspondence. So as to successfully impart, it is important to follow a few standards and rules. Coming up next are rules to guarantee powerful correspondence: clearness: lucidity of data is a significant guideline of correspondence. For beneficiaries to know the message plainly, the messages ought to be sorted out in a basic language. To guarantee that beneficiaries can without much of a stretch comprehend the importance of the message, the sender needs to impart unmistakably and unhesitatingly so the beneficiary can plainly and unquestionably comprehend the data.>

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