Vodafone Case

9-14

The problem that Vodafone had, as I understand it, is that their business model at the time was chaos. It is a bit surprising to me that a company of that magnitude could grow to be so large with an apparent lack of communication and understanding. The problem with the people in this situation seems to have been the lack of supreme leadership, no one was there to instill common practices, so each company just sort of did things their own way. The problem with the organization was that there really wasn’t any of which to speak, which goes right back to my point about the lack of leadership. It was still an “Organization”, but there very little about that was organized as a whole. The irony when talking about the technology factors is that we’re talking about a company that deals in mobile communications. One would assume that a company doing as well as they are and as big as they are, would be ahead of the curve, technologically speaking. It reminds me of the saying, “You can’t see the forest through the trees.” Luckily for Vodafone, they were able to identify the shortcomings within the infrastructure and rectify the situation before it really started to negatively affect business.

9-15

My understanding of the amount of time needed to effectively make the transformation involves the size of the company, the span with which they cover the globe, and to piggyback on the previous point, the different cultures involved within the company. The adjustment and ability to adapt is going to vary greatly from country to country.

9-16

As stated in the book (MIS, Pg.325), “Vodafone was a network of individual businesses, but it wanted to function more like a single global firm”. In order to do that, they needed to implement an ERP. Also stated, (MIS, Pg.325), “A common SAP ERP system would provide the technology platform for these changes by supporting information-sharing and common business processes”.

9-17

The issues regarding people are as I mentioned before, getting the people to accept and adapt to the new system at pace in accordance with the company’s and with their willingness to do so. An outside consulting firm was brought in to help with adjustments and make sure that everything transitioned smoothly. Also, the global teams had regular meetings with local teams to ensure things went well. The technology involved was not only that of an SAP ERP, but also tools from other outside sources such as Informatica, Opentext, Readsoft, Sabrix, Redwood, HP, and Remedy were used and integrated to make the platform function as desired.

9-18

The benefits that came from the transformation were very apparent, with greater efficiency and savings of a large sum of money, $719 million reported at the time of the publication. The total cost of ownership of the IT has gone down as well. The transition and transformation proved to be a huge success for Vodafone.