Analysis Of Governance Information Technology Management At Telstra

Analysis of the situation using the Doing Ethics Technique (DET)

Discuss About The Governance Information Technology Management.

Telstra is also known as Telstra Corporation Limited. It is Australia’s biggest telecommunications company. It builds as well as operates telecommunications markets voice, internet, pay television, internet access, mobile and many more products as well as services (McDougal, 2017). Telstra has been the largest producer of telecommunication services. Inspite of being the best provider of services Telstra faced so many issues that have affected the revenue of the company largely. The analysis of the issues and recommendations to avoid them have been mentioned in the below paragraphs.

Telstra has been facing various problems. These problems include

Not focusing on the customer:

The customer and service centricity has been evident in the IT operations team; it has not permeated its way in the rest of the IT organization. This is still not taking an IT component point of view of IT delivery (Pallegedara and Warren, 2016). In many factors IT service delivery is just as strong as the weakest link as well the failure to sell the concepts of ITIL in the parts of the IT organizations allows such week links to continue and the potential for IT service delivery to be at its best sub optional.

Lack in momentum

When ITSM tool vendor’s professional services team as well as external ITSM consultants is on site driving implementation, IITL based activity and change is very high. After the teams, leave IITL adoption loses momentum and the IT organization to fail to progress further with its journey to increase ITSM maturity (Freeland-Small, 2015). This is caused due to the firefighting nature of the IT organizations. At this moment, there is no time or resource for improvement. As a result, IT organizations are never able to achieve their objectives fully. They do not improve their level of ITSM maturity nor do they improve their IT support and IT services delivery to the organization.

Various facts regarding the problems faced by the IT executives of Telstra are-

A survey that has been carried out on Telstra across some countries like Hong Kong, India and Singapore and Australia yielded that among all the organizations 59% of them have detected minimum one security breach that has been interrupting their business. This breach takes place every month. This calculates to be more than double of the breaches that took place in 2015. Many government organizations have decided that the breaches that are taking place would be reported to the customers. This proves that cyber security is not an IT problem; it has become a business problem. Many companies are providing data security services around 2017 (Fitzgerald and Dwyer, 2017). The main key regarding cyber security is that the businesses get a control on their data value, where is it situated, which has access of the data and how properly is it protected. In order to keep data safe the It security experts suggested starting from the top level.

What are the facts?

Many organizations have provided the freedom to work from home. Their working site is accessible from any device any time. They have already offered cloud services that would be secured which would allow access to any data without any effort. Telstra has introduced a solution for this, which can complete the puzzle. This solution includes mobile telephony and fixed-line into one. This allows the workers to transit between devices during an ongoing business call. This is done from desk phone to mobile and then to laptop then tablet and again in the back process if required. In order to use the same number in all devices so that the clients are able to have an immediate impression on the physical presence of the business. With just a single tap, workers would be able to transfer the ongoing call to an employee. They can also switch their phones from work number in to their personal number.
Q3. What are the issues?

Telstra faces various issues. Network issue is on of the major issues faced by Telstra. This issue was previously a problem for just customers, but gradully it has become a major problem for the company (Nacht, 2016). At first Telstra pushed back or ignored this mishap series by saying just a bad luck. In this particular issue, frequency of the network is the root of the issue.

Customers claim to pay a huge amount of money while they take premium services of the company. This was because of the superior quality of network quality provided by Telstra. Telstra used to provide better quality services compared to its competitors (Thomas, Burmeister and Low, 2017). The recent problem faced by the company has embarrassed it largely. The main problem that the company faces is that it needs to retain the prices of premium services. This would help them to maintain the trust of the loyal customers. This would help the company to keep the loyal customers but it would fail to gain new subscribers.

The problems faced by Telstra affects the customer in first instance. It causes huge damage to the company’s business. The network quality that has been deteriorated results in customers to unsubscribe from the company’s premium services (Thomas, Low and Burmeister, 2018). This yields the company to lose its loyal and regular customers. Customers are u happy with the services provided by the company. Besides losing new subscribers, the company is also losing its regular customers. The issues have affected the business a lot. Their revenue has decreased largely.

What are the issues?

The ethical problems faced by Telstra include the avoidance of the issue faced by the company. When Telstra faced the network problem for the first time, the company ignored it and considered it would get normal in some time (Thomas, Burmeister and Low, 2017). This made the company lose its customers largely. The customers waited for the company to resolve the issues. They thought it would get resolved very soon. In addition, they did not abandon to the premium services of the company. After a definite time when the company kept ignoring the problems faced by its customers, people unsubscribed to its services (Wilton, 2017). when the company took the issue seriously, many customers have already unsubscribed.

The company could take the issue seriously and resolve it when it got a hint regarding the same. Ignoring it was the worst decision that it took. The company could have hired IT experts and resolved the issue as soon as possible. The company could also hire good decision makers who could take better decisions in such situations (Daly, 2015). The decision takers are an important part of every company. They take decisions during any situation. They play an important role when a critical situation arises.

The options that the company had are hiring a good decision maker who would take decisions intellectually during tough situations. The company could hire good IT experts who would detect the issue properly and resolve them as soon as possible (Turban, Whiteside and Outland, 2017). This would help the company in many ways. It would not have lost its honest customers. They should not have ignored it whenever they have to know about the issues facing by the problem. They should have had better backup services that could balance the damage caused by the issues already faced by the company.

The best option for the company was to take required action on the issues faced by the company. The company should not have ignored the problem. This option is the best because it should not have lost its customers (O’Connor, 2014). The loyal customers who had subscribed to Telstra’s premium services would not have stopped using them.

The new role of IT is to improve the sustainability and increase its scalability on government platforms. For this purpose, a new management platform is necessary. It is a logical living framework in order to manage IT services, these services are suppose to work in various circumstances. ITSM describes the effectiveness and efficiency of the service life cycle and gives a framework for governance for managing the services (Wijesinghe, Scheepers and Mcloughlin, 2016). By connecting the different needs in the plan that has been build, and operate teams, IT organizations are claiming improved efficiency, quality as well as cost.

Who is affected?

 Sloppy change management, for example, can cause business downtime that prevents customers from leveraging the organization online services (Campbell, 2017). This causes a decrease in satisfaction and reduces the productivity of the organization workforce. Reducing problem resolution time that in turn improves uptime and customer experience is just one example that indirectly improves the quality of a service.

Securing an extended government organization will require strategies that encompass both architecture and infrastructure. Traditionally, enterprise security tasks focus on securing organization endpoints, data centers, and extranet infrastructure and applications — in other words, we typically focus on protecting assets that the organization manages or over which it has direct control.

Thirty-six percent of the respondents ranked “making ITSM a priority” as their first choice of barriers to adoption. This indicates that ITSM is seen as a competing priority with other priorities that IT government organizations might have. At the same time, government agencies claim that supporting services is a high priority — 47% indicated that operating, optimizing, and supporting services is their highest priority. ITSM does have its roots in the IT operations space. However, recent iterations such as ITIL v3 and ITIL 2011 have adopted a much more holistic perspective of managing the service from its initiation and onto operation. The biggest issue is that to implement ITSM, IT organizations need to understand what their challenges are and what to improve. This is where the development of a strategy and road map comes into play. An ITSM strategy needs to be developed in alignment with the strategy of the government agency to support its goals and plans of growth, customer alignment, or other demands and agendas (Melendez, Dávila and Pessoa, 2016).

IT infrastructure and operation professionals work in a domain that is full of uncertainty and complexity, making improvements difficult. However, organizations that had had better understand their goals; process maturity, culture, behavior, skills, and capabilities cannot only work to improve that capability but also gain the ability to make more-effective investment decisions. ITSM provides a framework that encourages a broad holistic approach to service management that considers internal and external groups. Infrastructure and operation professionals should look to ITSM to rethink the delivery and support of services within their organization (Rahman, 2015). Adopting and continuously driving ITSM requires a methodology; Forrester recommends that IT leaders apply the following points:

 The goal of ITSM is to align IT services with business objectives and customers’ needs. To achieve this goal, IT must understand the requirements from the end users (Forsgren and Humble, 2015). The creation of a service strategy that defines the portfolio of services to be offered and the end user to be supported is the first step in an ITSM journey.

What are the ethical issues and their implications?

Once the organization has prioritized the ITSM processes to mature, the organization next step should be to review the organization existing ITSM tools and how they are being used. To get started, assess the organization tools portfolio based on the organization ITSM processes. Develop an inventory of current IT management tools to identify gaps and opportunities for tool rationalization based on where the organization is sufficient or deficient on ITSM process.

Almost any process or improvement around a system requires the understanding, definition, and achievement of benefits. Additionally, influencing factors that facilitate or impede its success need to be considered. Critical success factors are the few key areas that must go right for something to take effect.5 ITSM involves the strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual improvement of services. Adopting the ITIL framework and implementing ITSM is not the end goal; it is a means to achieving improvements to

Productivity, quality, business reputation, and low costs (Morana, Schacht and Gerards, 2015). To deliver these benefits, ITSM adoption with the far too common “build it and they will come” approach will not work. Because adopting ITIL requires considerable time, resource, and organizational change management, Forrester finds that one of the most critical success factors for ITIL is planning. Planning should be inserted across three key areas:

Understanding and determining the right people on the project team is most important to ITSM programs and projects. Additionally ensuring that planning, communication, awareness, and education activities are a focus area to encourage employee inclusion and prevent as well as manage resistance.

Many organizations are not able to see the current state of their ITSM and ITIL processes. Before undergoing any sort of process improvement program, IT organizations must determine their current state and which processes is most important going forward to deliver key business priorities or solve key business plans (Jäntti and Hotti, 2016). Successful ITSM implementations have prioritized the processes and then conducted a maturity assessment to close gaps between where the organization stands and where it wants to be.

Getting the right ITSM technology is not as big a key contributor to success as many might think. Too many IT organizations, unhappy with their current ITSM technology, jump feet first into replacement mode. This is the equivalent of applying a new coat of paint to a house that is falling down; people will still not want to live there.

Conclusion

What could have been done about it?

From the above paragraphs, it can be concluded that despite being the best telecommunication service provider Telstra has faced many issues and it has been affected due to this. It has lost many of its loyal customers. The ignorance and casual attitude towards the problems faced by the customers, Telstra had to lose many of its loyal customers. Some recommendations to overcome the issues have been mentioned below.

Recommendations that can be applied are as follows:-

Budgets are available at both the type of organizations, federal as well as state. Complexity in IT sectors increase day by day are scarcity of well-qualified technical skills is faced. Usage of ITSM provides two results. These results include increasing the effectiveness as well as the efficiency of IT operations and increasing the quality of operations. This also adds up the further savings. The savings is done by reducing the amount of resources that is being used for fixing problems. The surveys performed by Forrester’s on IT government executives that have implemented IISM, resulted in cellar recommendations for actions by the ones seeking quality as well as efficiency. The following recommendations can be applied.

ITSM allows organizations to manage as well as integrate processes at various levels. For its full affect, they need to tie up into higher level ITSM strategy. For example if the organization is introducing self-service activities, these activities need to be described in a service catalog. This catalog is a part of service portfolio. This service catalog would include a variety of service items. Some of them may be directly delivered by the government IT organizations and some of them might be by an outsourcer or partner. These services should have SLAs that would describe the cost as well as the quality of the service provided by the organization.

IT leadership is driving ITSM, so focus on it. Present the labor savings and quality improvements to get started. Then, based on early successes, add strategic justifications for continued service management — like better alignment with the business and a strong integration into service providers.

It is difficult to arrive at a place without intending to reach it. Therefore, while cost reduction and quality are the best places to start — and an incremental approach is most likely to succeed — the organization should figure out the long-term opportunities for ITSM at the organization’s agency. Consider addressing the entire services life cycle — including all of the organization sourcing partners, building a business-value proposition for these services, and improving IT-business alignment as a result. Then regularly review the organization short-term progress in terms of achieving both the cost-benefit targets that drive the initial funding as well as the ongoing ability to achieve big-picture results.

What are the options?

The gap between business priorities and IT delivery capabilities will be filled by a variety of technology services providers, from traditional IT services outsourcing incumbents to upstarts with cloud- and software-as-a-service-based business models.

To achieve benefits with ITSM governance and best practices, three critical success factors are important: Budget needs to be available. ITSM is an investment in people, process, and technology. The return on investment of ITSM is achieved through the investment in best practices that are able to streamline and automate processes to design, deliver, and maintain IT services to the respective organizations. Make ITSM a priority with goals and strategy. Top-down support is needed.         

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