Question

Building Information Systems & Organizational Change

By doing a search of the Internet, or by other research methods, find an example of an organization that introduced new technology and systems in order to effectuate changes in business processes, enhancements, and productivity gains (remember to post references).

Ponder these questions (answer as many questions as you can):

(1) What set of business problems was the organization trying to address?

(2) What solution did the organization choose to implement? Was it developed in-house or purchased from an external source?

(3) What business process changes resulted from the implementation of the new system?

(4) What level of risk was presented by the proposed organizational changes?

(5) From the readings in your text (starting on page 490), which one of the four kinds of structural organizational changes, enabled by this technology, best describes your case study?

(6) In the final analysis, did the new system and the associated organizational changes result in any process/quality improvements? How were these improvements measured? Or did this initiative fail to achieve the desired outcome? Why?

Answer 1

1. Reliance Industries Limited is a multinational conglomerate company owned by Mukesh Ambani. Though the company had high profitable business in other fields, it did not have much reach in telecommunication services. It had problems in gaining customers and increasing the service providing.

2. In order to overcome this problem, the company came up with a new in-house project called the Reliance Jio that provided three months of free 4G services to the customers. Within 1 month the company had a drastic increase of about 16 million subscribes in the first month of their launch. This further increased to over 100 million within 5 months time. And now, it is the India's largest and world's third largest network operator.

3. The company planned to increase it's customers by providing free internet services for 3 months period, which initially gained a lot of customers, and then began to provide various offers for internet data, outgoing calls and messaging services.

4. The organization had a risk of losing customers once the free service was over, but still they implemented the plan, which became a huge success. This was because the company retained its loyal customers and also attained new customers by providing various offers in their monthly recharge plans.

5. The company used business process reengineering as the organizational structural change that redesigned the business procedures of providing internet services to the customers.

6. The organizational change had resulted in increased customers and increased productivity which were measured by the increase in the number of subscribes and the profits gained by the company. This initiative of the company had become a huge success that helped them achieve their goal.