276 Al-Shammari
Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written
Job Losses
The challenge of job losses was a major part of the restructuring exercise. However,
one key executive maintained, “That’s not the object of the exercise, but a drop in
headcount is inevitable — and I think our employees accept that. It is a fact of life that
monopoly phone operators all over the world has been forced to slim down to become
competitive. [GTCOM] has a duty to its customers, shareholders and employees — and
refusing to face economic facts will do no favors for anyone in the long run. In the future,
job security will be related to our ability to retain customers.”
Vendor’s Involvement
It seems that the focus of the EDW and CRM vendors was limited to customizing
and implementing ICT tools, but not ensuring that the process and organization elements
were in place for effective management of the KCRM project. An effective vendor’s role
and involvement, as well as effective management of relationship with vendors are very
essential to the KCRM success.
Organizational Roles
The lack of structural mechanism for knowledge creation, sharing, and leveraging
made it very difficult for many employees to access particular knowledge or even to be
aware that knowledge is out there and needs to be leveraged. The absence of a formal
position in charge of KM in the corporate structure, for example, CKO, made it very
difficult for one group to learn from other groups outside their business functions. The
existence of a position such as a CKO helps in defining a formal methodology in
synthesizing, aggregating, and managing various types of CK throughout GTCOM.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
The challenge of competition, after many years of monopoly, is shaking off GTCOM
and is forcing it to abandon the old product-led traditions of the telecommunication
monopoly and, instead, focus sharply on customers and what they want — not what it
thinks they should have — in order to please them and win their long-term loyalty.
Focusing on customer relations is increasingly becoming a weapon used by many
service-oriented firms to face business challenges.
GTCOM has worked hard to maintain its strong market position in a highly
competitive and turbulent market. It has introduced a KCRM program that meant to
optimize GTCOM’s customer-centric knowledge resources, productivity, and proce-
dures by maintaining unified and integrated customer views with greater levels of detail
and accuracy. However, the KCRM initiative was faced with a number of problems and
challenges.
Following the implementation of the KCRM initiative, GTCOM has achieved mixed
results, namely, remarkable performance on the financial side but failure at the level of
operational excellence and at the level of customer service and satisfaction. Yet the
KCRM initiative has to mature into concrete corporate-wide change effort based on a
clear plan and strategy, and GTCOM still has a long way to go before being able to fully
realize the benefits of the KCRM.