Global Information System Strategy
This is a proposal made for an innovative service which is created by an ICT firm that has experience in managing cloud services but is now planning to venture into the convergence of technology by innovating.
The proposal explores the ICT industry, the significance and growth of converging technologies, and the solutions provided by the company.
Moreover, it also discusses the company specifics that could affect the operations of the company, its productivity, profitability and the attractiveness of the business as an investment.
The proposal aims to discuss the IT and telecommunication industry, the convergence of the two through innovation and its need in the market.
Further, it would discuss the target market of the company and the corporate structure for exploration of this market.
The company has a strong and dedicated team that plans to build a sound business with an efficient infrastructure to minimize operational expenses gradually and increase needed profits for the company.
Thus, this proposal discusses different aspects of the business, including solution, market, team, infrastructure and financials.
This would help an investor understand how the business makes an attractive investment both in terms of growth and profitability.
1.1 Digital Innovation
The company has developed a revolutionary platform helping transnational companies save on roaming costs which is a significant expenditure for these companies while its executives travel round the world.
It takes the roaming protocols from cellular networks to fixed networks, allowing people to roam around the company as well as public fixed networks in a seamless manner, thereby saving costs that are otherwise incurred in cellular roaming networks.
This platform uses one of the most advanced technologies working on the cloud, which is patented. It provides real-time geo-location capabilities as well as the dynamic management of PBX and routes the calls over cloud and fixed telephonic networks.
Unlike cellular telephony, this generates much lower costs to the company and, at the same time, provides better quality of service than most cloud-based voice services existing today.
1.2 Market
This is a start-up company that has build its services on the concept of lean and innovation is practiced right from the development of platform to formation of services within the organization.
This innovation would make employee mobility less costly as well as convenient with ease of access, better quality of calls, enhanced security and savings in costs while roaming.
The business would be targeting big corporate with operations or offices in multiple countries as the employee mobility of these companies is higher as their employees may need to travel from places to places for different kinds of meetings.
These employees include full-time employees, those employed on short term or long term assignment, business travellers, telecommuters, etc (Pyron & Cornelius, 2013).
To keep these employees connected, companies enable connection between their devices so that they can communicate on a regular basis. This requirement of connectivity is seen in around 47% of the companies globally.
Enterprises are also establishing strategies for managing this mobility of employees and many are supporting mobile applications for its sales executives (Forrester Research, 2012).
The innovation done by the company has a leading edge but it is likely to face a fierce competition soon as technology providers are driving towards convergence of technology.
Hence, after certain points, maintaining a competitive advantage can be difficult. However, with a first mover advantage in the field, the company expects to have more experience and trust as the strengths against competition.
The company aims at taking the maximum benefit out of existing market opportunity and the achievement would be counted in terms of fulfilment of goals of the company which includes break even before the completion of first three years of operations, high level of customer satisfaction leading to repeat purchases, good brand presence in the market building up image as the top service providers of ICT convergence services and meeting expectations of different stakeholders including investors in terms of sales.
2 About the Company
The company is an information communication and technology organization that provides infrastructure for voice services to various organizations.
The vision of the organization is to create a platform that can significantly save the costs as well as bring convenience to its customers.
The mission of the company is keep innovating and making the service best of its class as well as resolve the problems in roaming.
The company would provides its customers a software which they can install on their existing PBX network as well as an application on mobile phones of the employees of the company to make use of the services.
The company would not charge them anything upfront but the business model is based on fees for usage based on per minute charges.
2.1 ICT Industry
The ICT industry that the company is operating in is a very dynamic and always innovative industry with low levels of barriers to new entrants in the business.
The world is seeing hyper connectivity between people and societies all over the world enabled by technological advances in the ICT space.
Innovations today propel the industry globally making it a facilitator of the economic growth of respective countries.
Cloud based services are a result of innovation and it is increasingly being used by companies to costs involved in enterprise operations.
Moreover, an increasing number of entrepreneurs are entering the space with new and innovative solutions. ICT convergence has led to different levels of innovations, including device, pipe and cloud-based innovations (Dutta & Bilbao-Osorio, 2012).
The fixed and mobile telephone network pipes can converge into IP networks, an area that is focused on in this business. It has the potential to bring down the costs that companies incur while connecting devices globally.
Other than the IT industry, the service is also operating in the telecom space as the solution is the convergence of two technologies which has not been done so far.
Thus, the company would be affected by dynamics of both IT and telecommunication industry which is growing at a very decent rate of 21% year on year while IT industry is only growing at 5%. Combining the opportunities as well as benefits of the two industry, the company expects to operate in a very growth oriented environment.
2.2 Corporate Structure:
The company is founded by two engineers who have worked in the technology and telecommunication industries for more than 20 years.
The research and development for the company is managed by a head of research who has the experience of more than 25 years in managing primary research related to technology and have management several intellectual property development programs.
The other person would be the chief Technology officer managing the product strategy and deliveries.
The sales of the company would be managed by another experienced person in the technology domain with more than 25 years of sales expertise in technology solutions.
The entire operations from research to development to sales are headed by the CEO who is also a co-founder of the company.
The founders and heads of the organizations make a strong team as they not only carry a vast experience as well as have good number of connections in the industry but also, they are self-motivated personals who have shown their dedicated in their work while employed in the industry by big corporate.
2.3 Business Processes
Business processes of the company would include primary processes such as procurement, operations, service development, sales and Marketing, customer relationship management and secondary or support processes such as infrastructure management, human resource management, and process development.
Primary Business Processes: These include operations for generating outputs from inputs in the form of the service, which would first involve procurement of infrastructure and licences. For the development of services, different processes would be used, including research, analysis of the market, designing and engineering.
The services would then be offered to the market through various sales and marketing activities such as advertising, promotion, retailing, etc. A help desk with a call centre would be deployed to assist customers after the sale. Moreover, primary processes would also include training of employees to use services.
Secondary Business Processes: For managing core processes efficiently, there are some supporting processes that would help in management of core of the business.
The management of operations would require corporate governance, accounting, and administrative support. Further, support processes would also include hiring Employees of the organization, their training and managing their compensation.
Further, as it is a technology service which requires a good amount of hardware and software, the maintenance, designing and automation would be required (Brown, 2008).
2.4 Business Relationships
The business will have relationships with various different entities that are external to the company. These entities include suppliers, distributers, customers, financial firms, government and product integration partners.
Suppliers of this firm are the software developers, telecommunication service providers, licensing authorities, and IT infrastructure providers.
Telecommunication service providers are one of core suppliers of the service as they would be providing the bandwidth that would be used by the company to assist their clients.
Customers of the organization are the corporate that have their operations at least in two countries and those having their offices in more than one countries. The target companies would be assisted in reducing their roaming expenses which they incur against employee mobility.
The company would focus greatly on maintaining good relationships with acquired customers to get the repeat business for the ongoing service. The company aims to build trust on them such that they do not leave the company to competition in future.
The founder and co-founders already have some good relationships in the industry from companies that are requiring the services that would be provided. With these customers on board the company expects to gain a good word of mouth which would further grow the company as well as strengthen business relationships with its customers.
The company seeks finance from venture capitalist that would be the primary auditor and beneficiary of the revenues obtained from sales of the services of the organization.
They would be informed about the ongoing operations of the company from time to time in terms of productivity and profitability of the company so that they know how well their invested money is being used by the company for its operations and growth.
2.5 Risk Management
There can be certain risks that a business may be exposed while operating and thus, in order to not have losses sue to these risk, a plan for managing these risks in case of occurrence would be useful. Thus, this section deals with possible risks that the business may face and the plan to avoid them or minimize consequences.
These risks can be preventable, strategic or external. Preventable risks can occur due to employees cheating on company by taking inappropriate, illegal or unethical actions.
These risks can be controlled or avoided totally. For this, the company plans to monitor employee actions and provide specific authenticated access to employees based on their designations so that they can only use specific data and not misuse the data that is not required by them.
Strategic risks can occur when the company takes by lending money to partners or allow credit to customers, if the money is not recovered. These risks cannot always be avoided but they do not occur, it can bring good profits to the company and thus, the company is open to taking such risks.
For instance, the company is not charging anything to the customer up front and allowing a period of free use to their customers so that they can continue with the service only after liking it.
Here, involves a risk that the customer may go away after using the service for free for few days but a happy customer can bring a long term relationship and thus, good business (Kaplan & Mikes, 2012).
Certain risks are unavoidable and unexpected such as happening from natural calamities or an economic down turn. The disasters caused by such risks cannot be planned much in advance but if the company is liquid enough throughout its operations and then these can be managed to a greater extent.
Thus, the company plans to build a sound business model with decent cash flow such that the company would also be available with liquid cash to tackle emergencies. The company plans to reserve some cash for such emergencies as soon as the break even is achieved.
The proposal discussed the ICT industry and found that the innovation trend is moving towards convergence of data and voice services.
The company has planned to take this opportunity and have built an innovative software as a service which would make use of convergence tools to combine the power of traditional fixed line telephony with the cellular.
The solution would provide many benefits to multinational organizations such as ease of access to network, saving of roaming costs which is the primary advantage, use of cloud maintaining the quality of fixed line telephony and continuous connectivity between the employees of the corporation making the employee mobility easier, efficient, and costs effective in terms of connectivity.
The proposal discussed the solution architecture as well as analysed the infrastructure requirement of the company in order to establish the operations and the market.
Based on the analysis of industry, solution, company and IT requirements, the financials can be forecasted. Thus, this section presents the pro-forma profit and loss statement of the company for the first three years of its operations.
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