Exploring IS Related Issues in Business Context

Report: Phase 3, Final Submission

Organization Name: DOZE Internet

Course: Bus 516, Section: 02

Instructor: Dr. Ummaha Hazra

Team Name: Bazinga

Team Number: 03

Team Members:

Name Student ID

Md. Asif Hasan 152 1120 660

Sohidul Hoque 152 1471 660

Md. Sohan Sultan 143 060 8660

Letter of transmittal

August 4th, 2015

To, Dr. Ummaha Hazra MBA Department School of Business North South University Basundhara R/A, Dhaka- 1229

Subject: Letter of transmittal.

Dear Madam,

We are pleased to inform you that we have successfully completed the report “Exploring IS

Related Issues in business context”, using the various tools that we have learnt during this course.

We are thankful for this opportunity that you provided us with to carry out this report and put

the knowledge that you have shared with us to practical use.

We hereby undertake this report as a written piece produced by us for the academic research of

the course. We have abided by the structure and rules.

We kindly request you to accept our report as a part of our academic requirement

Sincerely,

Md. Asif Hasan ID: 152 1120 660 Signature______________

Sohidul Hoque ID: 152 1471 660 Signature______________

Md. Sohan Sultan ID: 143 060 8660 Signature ______________

Masters of Business Administration

North South University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

At first we are grateful to almighty Allah, because we have been able to complete the assignment within the given time period. We want to thank, our honorable faculty member Dr. Ummaha Hazra, for her guidance, supervision and suggestion through out of study period of our report. Her continuous support and re-enforcement has encouraged us to do study and work on the report properly. We are like to express our gratitude towards Mr. KM Habib Uddin, Manager, IT support service, DOZE internet. Without his cooperation and given information we could not have finished this report properly. We thankful towards all the students of this course who give valuable opinion and honest replies, which were very essential to complete this report. All over again we want to give my millions of thanks and our honest respect to her who always tried to teach us new difficult things in an easy way, our honorable Instructor Dr. Ummaha Hazra.

Table of Contents Topics Page No.

Executive Summary 01

Organizational Overview 02 - 03

The Business Problems of DOZE Internet 03 - 04

The need of an IS at DOZE Internet 05

The Alternatives 05 - 07

The chosen IS and decision criteria 07 - 09

OTRS: The Solution 09 - 10

Measuring Success 10 - 11

Reflection: Our Learning form the report 11 - 12

Conclusion & References 13

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Executive Summary

In this era of modern science and technological revolution, the learning of Computer Information

System is a must especially in the organizational and professional context. While doing the

analysis of different IS related issues, we have been able to relate different theories we have

learnt throughout the course with the organizational and business context of DOZE internet, the

organization we have chosen to accomplish this report.

At the very first, we started this report with an organizational overview and details company

profile of DOZE internet. Then we tried to dig down the basic IS related business problem

(Efficient CS management) and other relevant issues faced by the company. Based on this

problems we tried to find out the urge of an IS by DOZE and the alternatives they have considered

to satisfy their requirement.

Then we have discussed in details about their selected customer service management software,

Open-Source Ticket Request System (OTRS) and the decision criteria of choosing it. After that we

have incorporated the points those are considered by the organization as the measurement of

success of overcoming the IS related business problems they faced previously.

At the very last, we have concluded this report with the learning we have got throughout the

repot and required references of information we have used to complete this report.

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Organizational Overview:

Name of the Company: DOZE Internet

DOZE Internet, started its journey on November 2014 is a Strategic Business Unit (SBU) of System

Solution and Development Technologies Ltd. (SSD-Tech), one of the leading IT company of

Bangladesh at present.

SSD-TECH is a technology company with a growing Asia Pacific presence for more than a decade

having experience in providing solutions for telecommunication operators, financial institutions

and large enterprises. SSD-TECH started its journey back in 2004 with 10 employees and a mission

titled “Innovative Use of Technology for a Better Tomorrow” now has become a pioneer in the

booming IT industry of Bangladesh with more than 300 employees and regional office in

Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar.

The ISP SBU of SSD-TECH: DOZE Internet

Company Profile:

The starting: DOZE internet started its journey on November 2014 but commercially

launched from February 2015, meanwhile they did their required organizational and

infrastructural development.

Business industry: DOZE plays in the competitive market of High speed Broadband

Internet Service Provider (ISP) for both home and corporate users. With its lighting speed

of 10Mbps, 25Mbps and 50MBps packages, DOZE focuses to secure the position of fastest

internet service provider of the town. Currently DOZE is covering the whole Dhaka City

with its super-fast speed and convenient service. Though DOZE is a newbie in the ISP

industry but its IT related expertise of more than a decades, strategic business planning

and passionate workforce is fueling the expanding consumer base rapidly.

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Organizational Structure: Currently DOZE is operating with 70 employees and the

number is still going up as the business is expanding rapidly. The employees are

responsible for the technical and business operation of the company. As it is a SBU of SSD-

Tech so the top level required decisions are taken by the SSD-Tech top tire management.

The head of the SBU is yet to be announced.

The Business Problems of DOZE Internet:

Doze Internet is currently doing vibrant business. But the way wasn’t smooth enough to reach to

this position. They started to provide the services due to the lack of good service provider in the

city. Doze Internet started its business with a very little number of customers to become the best

internet service provider of the city. Due to extensive marketing campaigns and efforts, they

succeeded to create awareness among potential customers. So, the number of customer started

to increase within a short time. Since the number of potential customers were increasing, the

maintenance became difficult because of having improper data management system. Now we

would like to highlight few business problems that Doze Internet started facing while doing their

business.

Inefficiency in Data Source Management: It was becoming a major problem for Doze

Internet to provide best services and information regarding the coverage location,

packages, queries etc. to its potential and existing customers. Doze Internet look for its

potential and existing customers through Facebook page, official website and call center.

As Doze Internet collect information from different sources, it has become a real problem

for them to merge all of these information together. Due to having a common platform

they are facing these kinds of problems.

Data Mismanagement: Since Doze Internet had a huge information from above

mentioned sources, they didn’t use any unified format to pass it to other departments.

They used to collect the data or information manually. So they started to lose data. For

example, customer manager used to note down any queries and complaints in papers.

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The probability of getting lost is much higher this situation and they did lost a lot of

complaints. As they have queries from multiple sources it had become a big issue to

provide services to their customers in the right sequence and in time. So they couldn’t

allocate these information among different departments within the required time. So

they couldn’t take proper actions because of having timely data. As a result it led to the

whole organization inefficient.

Lack of Connectivity among the Departments: The departments lead the whole

organization. But they didn’t have any real time connection or platform to follow the

instructions properly to handle the customer queries. For this reason they faced two

problems. First, they couldn’t provide information regarding different issues like

marketing offers, coverage issues etc. Customers didn’t know about these offers. So sales

was going down so was the profits and the other thing is they didn’t have an

interconnected relation between the departments. So when customers needed any help

they couldn’t provide their hand properly due to lack of this relation. So the satisfaction

level of the customers was below average.

Higher Agency Cost:

Employees used to note down the customers information in papers or sticky notes. Due

to not having any business intelligence system Doze Internet needed a lager workforce to

run the organization. It had increased their agency cost a lot. It has a large economic

impact in internal management because they need a cost for monitoring this large

workforce.

Inadequacy in Decision Making: Since Doze Internet doesn’t have any business

intelligence system, they couldn’t afford to provide any summarized report based on solid

information. Top level management couldn’t make any good decision based on this

information. So they couldn’t take the best decisions for the organization.

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The need of an IS at DOZE Internet:

The evolution of Information Technology fueling the need of Internet with an increasing rate. The

urge of a high speed and stable internet connection is more like a necessity rather than a luxury

now a days. The customers/users of internet are more knowledgeable and tech savvy so it a must

to have a cutting age customer service or after sales service management system to meet the

demands of them. So, deploying an IS like customer support management system was the he

best possible solution in this context for DOZE internet.

But choosing an IS overnight was not an easy job. There were several factors needed to be

considered by the management while selecting the CS management system for DOZE Internet,

like installation, subscription and maintenance cost, integration of the IS with the working

platform of the company, organizational and employee’s adaption with the system, extent of

customization, flexible accessibility, security etc. considering these factors the management

wanted to search for alternative IS that can meet these requirements.

The Alternatives:

Alternative 1

osTicket:

osTicket is an open-source support ticket system that gives users the ability to track, modify

and respond to client-generated tickets via online forms, email, and phone. It provides a

powerful, centralized method of helpdesk request management that supports multiple

simultaneous users.

Features:

The software allows customization of data collected form users in order to swiftly resolve the

ticketing issues. Tickets and help topics can be added to the custom lists of the collected data.

HTML email is supported featuring rick text markup in staff relies and reports. The software

also features ticket filters with customizable rules for routing of incoming tickets to the right

departments. osTicket offers special ticket locking mechanism for locking of tickets to avoid

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conflicting responses and save time. Tickets can be transferred between departments to

ensure their resolution to the proper personnel. Auto-responder of osTicket generates

automatic replies and notifications whatever a new ticket is opened or a message is received.

The software also offers customization of internal notes, service level agreements, custom

portal, and dashboard reports.

Considering Factors:

DOZE Internet started to use this software as trial basis to find out whether it can

meet their requirement or not, but the desired output could not be achieved

The overall processing time of the software was slow than the expected level

DOZE internet deals with a large scale of data so they need to handle thousands of

customer service related issues per day, but whenever they gave input of these large

scale of data in the software it slowed down and could not process the data efficiently.

Though osTicket is made on open source platform and it was customizable but the

default features was not adequate to satisfy the requirement of DOZE Internet.

Alternative 2:

Zendesk: Zendesk is a SaaS Suite developed to be a platform for customer service support,

help desk ticketing and issue tracking. It is the creation of a company of the same name

founded in 2007.

Features:

Zendesk offers an automated workflow with flexible ticket management

Interaction with customers through various channels (email, phone, social media)

Native apps available for all types of smartphones, including Android and iOS devices

The interface of the online software can easily be branded

Many third party apps are already integrated (Google Apps, Open API, Salesforce)

Considering Factors:

Zendesk is a fully commercial Software as Service (SaaS) tool for managing the

customer service, so it is quite pricy, price starting for $29/user/month. So DOZE

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Internet management could not take the chance of investing this much in the initial

stage

It is fully cloud based solution so management was uncomfortable at the thought of

externally operated tools, dependency on third parties, and a lack of influence on the

operation and Security of the data storage and operation.

Zendesk is not open source so the scope of customization is lower in User level and

impossible in source code development level, because of this lacking the management

was not interested on Zendesk.

The chosen IS:

After considering the above mentioned alternative software the management of DOZE Interment

has chosen the 3rd Alternative IS, OTRS software, which can satisfy all of their current

requirement in terms of customer query and compliant management.

Open-source Ticket Request System (OTRS), is a free and open-source trouble ticket system

software package that a company, organization, or other entity can use to assign tickets to

incoming queries and track further communications about them. It is a means of managing

incoming inquiries, complaints, support requests, defect reports, and other communications.

The decision criteria of choosing OTRS:

Cost: If we analyze from managerial perspective, every organization is highly concerned

about installing and maintaining a high end Information System software. Most likely,

apart from large scale corporate houses of big production based companies most of the

small or medium companies do not require all the high end features of an IS though they

need to pay higher amount if they want to use one. So, considering this issue the

management of DOZE internet decided to go for OTRS, which is freeware, means free to

use and open for all. There is also paid version of OTRS but the free version is good enough

to meet the demand of DOZE internet.

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Open source and customizable: Started in 2011, OTRS is part of the Lisog open source

stack initiative. This software is highly customizable with various field options. As it is open

source, so it can be changed by anyone in the source code level. This was an important

decision criteria while choosing the software, because the mother company of DOZE

Internet is SSD-Tech, a renowned IT and software solution firm with hundreds of in house

talented software developers. So the management always wanted a software which they

can change as per their requirement and OTRS given them just that.

High compatibility: OTRS highly compatible with different OS and Database platform. It’s

written in Perl and runs on the Apache web server. It supports many databases: MySQL,

PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition to Windows, OTRS installs

on Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like systems. Convenient prebuilt packages are

available for open SUSE/SLES, Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, and Windows. So high level

compatibility was an important reason of choosing OTRS because being a cutting age

software firm and ISP SSD-Tech and DOZE internet needs to work with different OS and

Database platform simultaneously.

User friendly: The web interface of OTRS is made more user-friendly by using JavaScript.

All the internal and external stakeholders can use and provide their feedback easily from

their home, office or anywhere using web browser. The User Interface (UI) is designed is

such way so that someone doesn’t have to have high end technical expertise to operate

OTRS.

Large scale data handling (high scalability): OTRS is highly scalable, capable of handling

thousands of tickets per day and a nearly unlimited number of simultaneously working

agents. Doze internet currently has an upward trend in number of consumers. So

everyday thousands of tickets are being issued regarding bandwidth and customer

services related issues. OTRS makes this process very smooth and efficient for the working

agents.

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Ticket Issuing & History: When a customer makes any query or complain regarding an

issue, an agent creates a ticket using OTRS. Every ticket generated by the system has

persistence or "history" showing what happened to the ticket within its life cycle. OTRS

has the ability to merge multiple requests about the same incident, thus making it

possible to work on an incident rather than on singular requests.

Data Security: While selecting any IS, security of the data and customer information is

one the major considering issue by the management both in operational level and data

storage level. With OTRS, a company can download the entire code, adapt it, and operate

it within that company’s own infrastructure rather than cloud based third party solution.

There aren’t really any obvious limits to this. So the data security requirement was

satisfied in this way.

Other Influential Issues: There are also few influential factors that drove Doze internet

management to choose OTRS e.g. Auto Email Notification which helps the agents to get ticket

status, Remote access helps the users to operate and control OTRS from anywhere even when

the user is not connected with the internal network, Multiusers access allow different agents

from different departments to get relevant update from OTRS.

OTRS: The Solution

When Doze Internet started doing business, it didn’t have too many customers. Soon they started

having a large pool of customers. Providing a huge number of customers wasn’t easy enough.

They started losing customers data, information, complains and suggestions. They needed

something to increase this customer service efficiency. After doing some research regarding the

problem and all that, Doze Internet came up with the software named OTRS. OTRS has brought

a systematic routine in the organization. Now every stakeholders know what’s going on in the

organization and what will be the possible solutions of the problems. People are becoming

satisfied more and more with the services of Doze Internet. It actually helped to reach to its goal

which to give 100% satisfaction to the customers through an efficient customer service

management. It increased the sales of the team because of the word of mouth of the customers.

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Since every one of the organization has an access to OTRS, they get updated with the problems

with a notifications. If the problem isn’t solved then it will keep sending mails to everyone.

Eventually employees won’t forget about the matter and send a solution for customers. That’s

how Doze Internet have solved the problem.

Measuring Success

By talking to the management of Doze Internet, we have concluded to these below factors that

they measure as their success factors of using OTRS.

Data Source Integration:

As we have already analyzed in our business problem report that Doze Internet was facing

problems to manage the query and complaints coming from different sources like

facebook, website and call center, ORTS is storing all the data coming from different

sources. Through this integration OTRS collects all the data from sources by saving agents

time and make it more efficient at the same time.

Cross Departmental Connectivity:

OTRS works as a bridge between different departments. Now everyone knows about the

problems of the customers. This benefit helps departments to do their job properly. For

example it helps accounts departments to make sure whether any customer was facing

problem regarding billing issues, marketing department can find out the effectiveness of

the ongoing marketing campaigns. Most importantly their support department can

identify what problems customers are facing. So that they can take proper initiative to

solve the problem.

Smooth Decision Process:

As currently Doze Internet have solid information regarding customers, they can make

customized reports, introduce marketing campaigns or incentives or offers easily. They

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can reach to any conclusion easily based on these information. It consumes less time and

helps to forecast any certain event. The middle and top level managers can extract desired

information and get customized report to take decision. For example: Marketing

department can generate a report of how many sales queries have been made in a month

or during any specific marketing campaign. Similarly support department can initiate

report on the trend of customer complaint and problems and take required decision to

make the service better.

Positive customer Feedback:

Since the inception of DOZE internet, the ultimate objective of the management and

employees was to serve the customer with best possible customer service of the town.

Initially they faced a lot of challenge in the way of achieving this goal because of not

having a cutting as IS. But eventually with the launching of OTRS in the business system,

they have managed to serve the customer with more efficiency. So, it did not tale long

period of time to get positive feedback from customer regarding the service quality and

efficiency. Accordingly to a recent customer satisfaction survey for the exciting subbase

of DOZE Internet, the customer has given a score of 4.20 in scale of 5.00

Reflection: Our Learning form the report

Making of this group report on Doze Internet and IS has given us a thorough knowledge about an

organization which can help us in real life. This real life experience has taught us how to convert

a problem into opportunity. Now we are going to describe what we learnt from this project.

Organizational Structure Analysis: At the very first of this report we have done an

organizational structure analysis through with we were exposed to DOZE internet formal

organizational structure and workflow. It helped us to understand in a better way that

how real life organization operate in the business world with their working and

organizational structures, norms and cultures.

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Analysis of Business Environment: By doing Porter’s Five Forces Analysis for this report

we have got to learn that how an IT related firm works in a competitive business

environment, who are their competitors, what are the barriers, what kind of

opportunities they can take form the business context and all that. We didn’t have a clear

idea while we are going through these theories. But this practical knowledge has helped

to understand and relate easily.

Exposure to the Business problem: While making the phase 2 of this report we have been

exposed to different business problem facing by DOZE internet in the organizational,

social, ethical and legal context. We have come to know how the management deals with

the problems and find the best possible solution that satisfy both the internal and external

stakeholders.

IS related knowledge: While making the final phase of the report, our knowledge base

increased to a higher level regarding real life use of different Information System like

customer service management solution by ZenDesk, osTickets and OTRS. As DOZE

internet uses the OTRS we have a details exposure on this software; how it works and

how DOZE managing its customer service effectively using this.

Crisis Management: Doze Internet found out that they are facing a problem. They didn’t

lose their hope and gave up. Instead they sat together and came up with this OTRS idea.

They did brainstorming and talk to customers and solved this problem. It taught us to be

more patient during a problem.

Formal Structure: Doze Internet followed a formal structure to sort out the problem. They

did survey based on problem. They went directly to the customers and talked to them.

Customers told them to bring some changes according to their needs. They also did some

research about the industry like what other competitors are doing? Why people are using

their services? These things we can relate to the theories that we learn from our

institutions. We will be able to use this in our real life in future.

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Conclusion:

While starting this report, all we have got the theories of CIS but the practical application. Then

we have started working on this group repot and started to realize how real life IS works in the

business and organizational context, how a company face the problems related with not having

a proper IS, how they deal with it, what kind of alternatives they can consider to overcome it.

Then we found out the business impact of installing and using a proper IS and the relevant issues.

We do strongly believe, the learnings we have got by accomplishing this report will be very helpful

for our future professional endeavor.

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