274 Al-Shammari
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in the organization. Some adjustments may be required to assure a balance between
systems requirements and functionality from one side and flow of business processes
from the other side.
Evidence of the ineffective ICT infrastructure is the lack of integration with previous
technology initiative and legacy systems. There are several problems with integration.
First, integration complexity causes delay. Systems will rarely operate in real time
resulting in delays in synchronizing information. This can cause embarrassment to
companies and aggravation to customers when updates to one channel are not reflected
immediately in the others.
The second problem is that integration adds overhead cost. The integration must
be implemented, administered, and maintained independently of the actual customer
service applications for each delivery channel. The problems of complexity and costs are
magnified each time a change is made to a channel application.
Customer’s Expectations and Satisfaction
In addition to being inefficient in capturing some customer data, the CRM system
still suffers from limited storage capacity/lack of scalability, complexity, limited process-
ing speed, and lack of technology fitness in terms of growth and implemented capacity
of the KCRM projects. These shortcomings of the system could adversely affect
customers’ experiences and satisfaction, as well as employees’ morale.
Power Users
Knowledge/power users are people who are responsible for generating knowledge
about competitors, external market, products, and so forth, using the EDW initiative.
Actual knowledge users of the EDW may include people from units such as sales,
marketing, market research, and human resource management, although potential users
could include other departments such as product development. As business-wide
requirements were not effectively identified, so the knowledge requirements of different
business units were not being successfully transferred into data entities, and many units
did not seem to be constantly using the system. It seemed that heavy usage of the EDW
system was at the marketing and sales function, as the culture in other units may not have
favored the usage of the system as a source for generating knowledge. One manager
maintained, “I don’t know if the finance people use it enough because they do have a
SAP system, I don’t know if it is integrated with the EDW.”
Knowledge users of major KCRM systems, for example, the EDW, at GTCOM need
to be expanded to include functions other than sales and marketing, such as finance,
operations and logistics, and so forth.
Quality of Data
Following an identification of business needs and agreeing on a definition of data
elements of the system, data cleansing should be conducted before putting up the EDW
initiative. Otherwise, false indications and misleading information would be the outcome.
Data accuracy is very critical as EDW systems retrieve data and put them in the required
format, but if the raw data were not completely filtered, then the validity of the project’s
information would be at risk. Poor data quality at GTCOM resulted from accumulation of