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 their 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 their 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, multitiered 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 multitiered 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 show no issues.

- The infrastructure group's continuous network monitoring report shows 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.

• 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.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Based on the findings presented by UVN Consulting several issues can be identified within Orange that contribute to the recurring system outages and overall organizational challenges 1 Organizational ... View the full answer