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Case Study: Organizational Culture’s Role…
Case Study:
Organizational Culture’s Role in Information System Success
The Company
Orange is a b2b cellular phone service company that serves carrier, retail, and
enterprise customers that offer cellular network services or equipment to retail
customers. Orange operates in 60 countries and has an annual revenue of $10B.
The Problem
Orange experienced frequent system outages that affected its ability to fulfill the
service-level agreements they had in place with their customers. These outages had the
potential to damage the company’s reputation and lose its enterprise customers.
Large cellular carriers in the United States, Europe, and Australia had already
expressed dissatisfaction with Orange’s CEO and threatened to terminate their
contracts, which would have a potential multibillion-dollar impact on Orange’s bottom
line.
The Investigation
Orange’s CEO asked his CIO to investigate and resolve the problem urgently. The CIO
turned to the VP of Infrastructure for answers since the VP of Infrastructure managed all
information systems and was responsible for fulfilling the service-level agreements in
place with their customers.
The VP of Infrastructure responded to the CIO, indicating that his infrastructure group
had investigated and tested all infrastructures, including networks, servers, and all
networking peripherals. They did not find any problems. The VP of Infrastructure
suggested to the CIO that the problem was not from the infrastructure. The problem was
caused by the complex, multitier application implemented and maintained by the
application group.
The CIO turned to the VP of Application for answers. The VP of Application presented
their application test results, which showed high availability and performance of the
application. The VP of Application insisted that the problem was with the infrastructure
since they had tested the application thoroughly before deploying it to the production
environment’s infrastructure.
The CIO was getting frustrated and coordinated a meeting with the VP of Infrastructure and the VP of Application to discuss the issue. Nothing was accomplished at the meeting since both the VP of Infrastructure and the VP of Application insisted that their group did not cause the problem and justified it with their test and performance
measurement reports.
The CIO decided to hire a consulting company to help investigate the issue. They hired UVN Consulting for this investigation. The UVN consultant interviewed the CIO, the VP of Infrastructure, the VP of Application, and a few key staff members from each group.
They also reviewed all testing, performance measurement, and outage reports for the prior 4-month period. The UVN consultant also interviewed the sales and marketing departments.
The Consultant’s Findings
The UVN consultant presented their findings to the CIO, indicating the following:
– The multi-tiered application, which is a mission-critical application, was
implemented and tested by the application group in their test environment before
deploying to the production infrastructure managed by the infrastructure group.
The test and performance report from these tests shows no issues.
– The infrastructure group’s continuous network monitoring report shows the system
outages occur whenever there is network load fluctuation. The consultants
observed an unusually high volume of network traffic right before each system
outage.
– The UVN consultant suspected the marketing department’s marketing campaigns
caused the unusually high volume of network traffic. The infrastructure group was
not aware of the marketing campaigns.
– The UVN consultant suspected the system outage could affect the performance
of the application and/or the infrastructure.
Appendix
A Humble Beginning
The company found its root in a small cell phone retail store in Chicago. The founder
acquired the small cell phone retail store from its original owner without payment. After
taking over ownership of the store, the founder not only improved the cell phone retail
store’s revenue, but he also transformed it into a $10B b2b cellular phone service
company.
Company Culture
While Orange was transformed from a small retail store to a $10B b2b service company, its owner-centric and retail store management culture has never wholly
Transformed into an enterprise-oriented organizational culture.
Each salesperson operates in a silo in a retail store. The focus is on individual sales performance, and the culture is driven by sales commissions. This retail, individual-salesperson culture significantly influences how the different departments operate at Orange.
The company has been valued at $10B for 4 years, and it seems like it has a problem
growing from here
QUESTION:
Provide a case analysis report by presenting and supporting a 3 to 4 page rationale for the following:
Part 1: Information Technology and Business Performance
Analyze how information technology affects business performance.
Assess the implications and economic impact to the company due to frequent system outages.
Analyze the relationship between business and information technology strategy.
Analyze the cost of misalignment between information technology and business strategy.
Provide a case analysis report by presenting and supporting a 3 to 4 page rationale for the following:
Part 2: Information Technology and an Organization’s Culture
Based on UVN Consulting’s findings, analyze what you believe to be the problem. Think about the issues in the context of organizational culture, process, and communications.
Evaluate how the current organizational culture impacts the success of information technology implementation.
Summarize what needs to be changed going forward at the organizational level to avoid similar issues.
