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STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEM PLAN, A DIGITAL MARKETING COMPANY

BY

MR.JETPAWIT WANGPEERAWONG AN INDEPENDENT STUDY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAM

(MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS) MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

FACULTY OF COMMERCE AND ACCOUNTANCY THAMMASAT UNIVERSITY

ACADEMIC YEAR 2017 COPYRIGHT OF THAMMASAT UNIVERSITY

Ref. code: 25605902037133TFG

STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEM PLAN, A DIGITAL MARKETING COMPANY

BY

MR.JETPAWIT WANGPEERAWONG AN INDEPENDENT STUDY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAM

(MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS) MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

FACULTY OF COMMERCE AND ACCOUNTANCY THAMMASAT UNIVERSITY

ACADEMIC YEAR 2017 COPYRIGHT OF THAMMASAT UNIVERSITY

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Independent Study Title STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEM PLAN, A DIGITAL MARKETING COMPANY

Author Mr.Jetpawit Wangpeerawong Degree Master of Science Program

(Management Information Systems) Major Field/Faculty/University Management Information Systems

Commerce and Accountancy Thammasat University

Independent Study Advisor Dr.Surat Kointarangkul Academic Years 2017

ABSTRACT

A digital marketing company was studied to plan a more competitive and efficient information system ( IS) . Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis as well as Porter’ s Five Forces Framework, for analyzing business competitiveness, was used. Political, economic, social and technological ( PEST) analysis was also taken into account to describe a framework of macro-environmental factors used in environmental scanning of strategic management. Company background, including business model, organizational chart, vision, and missions were examined to determine critical success factors (CSF’s) internally and externally, such as opportunities and bonuses.

Results were that an information systems strategic plan was suggested to improve internal processes for competitiveness. Overall internal performance would be improved, reducing errors and work hours while strengthening core business by virtualizing a relationship between information technology (IT) and service delivery. Keywords: Information technology (IT) master plan, PEST, Porter's Five Forces

Framework, SWOT analysis, Digital Marketing

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This independent study could not be successfully conducted without valuable assistant from various people. I also would like to express my sincere thanks to my adviser, Dr.Surat Kointarangkul for his tremendous assistance in conducting this research and provided and suggested some interested and useful point of views.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this study to my family, friends, and colleagues for all supports. Mr.Jetpawit Wangpeerawong

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT (1) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (2) LIST OF TABLES (7) LIST OF FIGURES (8) CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Company Background 1 1.2 Business process 2 1.3 Products and services 3 1.4 Goals 4

1.4.1 Vision 4 1.4.2 Mission 4 1.4.3 Value Propositions 4

1.5 Future competition 5 1.6 Company Departments 5

1.6.1 Management 6 1.6.2 Client Services 6 1.6.3 Corporate Support 6 1.6.4 Operations 7 1.6.5 Product 7 1.6.6 Sales and Marketing 7 1.6.7 Strategy 7 1.6.8 Support 8

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1.7 Number of employees 9 1.8 Future Plan 10

CHAPTER 2 ANALYSIS 12

2.1 Current Situation 12 2.2 Current Problems 15

2.2.1 Culture 15 2.2.2 Asian clients 15 2.2.3 Turnover rate 16 2.2.4 Seasonal Workload 16

2.3 Porter’s Five Forces Analysis 17 2.3.1 Threat of New Entrants 18 2.3.2 Threat of Substitute Service 18 2.3.3 Bargaining Power of Buyer 19 2.3.4 Bargaining Power of Supplier 19 2.3.5 Rivalry among existing competition 20

2.4 SWOT Analysis 22 2.4.1 Strengths 22 2.4.2 Weaknesses 24 2.4.3 Opportunities 24 2.4.4 Threats 25

2.5 PEST Analysis 26 2.5.1 Political 26 2.5.2 Economic 27 2.5.3 Social and cultural 27 2.5.4 Technological 27

2.6 Summary 28

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CHAPTER 3 CURRENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS 30

3.1 System information team structure 31 3.2 Current Systems 32

3.2.1 DaVinci 33 3.2.2 Autotask 34 3.2.3 Namely 35 3.2.4 Kudos 37 3.2.5 iLearn 38 3.2.6 Message Stream Protocol 39 3.2.7 IBM Unica Suite 40

3.3 System information resources 42 3.4 Problems of the current information systems 45

CHAPTER 4 BUSINESS STRATEGIC PLANNING 50

4.1 Analytic results from Porter’s Five Forces, SWOT and PEST analysis 50 4.1.1 PEST Analysis 50 4.1.2 SWOT Analysis 51 4.1.3 Porter’s Five Forces Analysis 52

4.2 Porter’s generic competitive strategies 53 4.3 Company Strategies 56

4.3.1 Strengthening the core business 56 4.3.2 Only Focus on the core business 58 4.3.3 Developing a Knowledge Management Strategy 59 4.3.4 Improve teleconference system 61 4.3.5 Process improvement 62

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CHAPTER 5 RECOMMENDED INFORMATION SYSTEMS 63

5.1 Knowledge Management 64 5.1.1 Objective 64 5.1.2 System capabilities 64 5.1.3 System Alignment and Sustainability 66

5.2 New product and New systems 67 5.2.1 Objective 67 5.2.2 System capabilities 67 5.2.3 System Alignment and Sustainability 70

5.3 Teleconference system 71 5.3.1 Objective 71 5.3.2 System capabilities 71 5.3.3 System Alignment and Sustainability 73

5.4 Budgeting 73 5.5 Value evaluation 74 5.6 System prioritization 76

REFERENCES 78 BIOGRAPHY 80

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LIST OF TABLES

Tables Page 1.1 Number of the company employees from date 25 May 2017 9 1.2 Number of new joiners and leavers from 2014-2016 11 2.1 Comparing while one team is busy and the other team is having a 17 slow week 3.1 Information system and application in the company 32 5.1 Strategy plans and information systems mapping 63 5.2 Knowledge management costing break down 66 5.3 Finding new systems costing break down 70 5.4 Teleconference system costing break down 73 5.5 Summary of budgeting for the new information systems 73 5.6 Value evaluation of Knowledge Management System 74 5.7 Value evaluation of Finding new systems 75 5.8 Value evaluation of Teleconference System 75 5.9 Systems prioritization 76

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figures Page 1.1 Company overview primary business process 3 1.2 What the CEO explains about the future enterprise 5 1.3 Company’s organization chart 9 1.4 Showing number of employees that joined and left in last 4 years 11 2.1 Average Project Price by country. 18 2.2 DataRati – An Australian Digital marketing agency 21 2.3 BlueStar – An Australian Digital marketing agency 21 2.4 Quantium – An Australian Digital marketing agency 22 2.5 A new product that focus on quality content over quantity 23 3.1 System information team structure 31 3.2 Showing the systems that are in VPN and external systems that can 33

access from anywhere 3.3 DaVinci home page showing recent activities 34 3.4 An example for a best practice in DaVinci 34 3.5 Showing my time sheet for the week commencing of 7 July 2017 35 3.6 Showing my Personal Development Plan 36 3.7 Showing requesting time off page 37 3.8 Kudos visualizing my personality based on my colleague’s feedbacks 38 3.9 Showing all available course in iLearn 39 3.10 Showing MSP home page 40 3.11 Showing an example of creating an email creative with a simple 40 text output 3.12 Showing all available IBM Unica components that can be integrated 41 to IBM Unica campaign 3.13 showing an interface for building a campaign 42 3.14 Showing storage growth from established to 2013 43 3.15 Showing the idea of having cold standby site if the main data center 44

cannot operate as usual

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3.16 Showing independent networks of each locations connect to each 44 other via internet

3.17 Showing all internal systems mapping 45 3.18 Analysis of timesheets from Telco team 46 3.19 Analysis of timesheets from Retail team 46 3.20 Analysis of timesheets from New Zealand team 47 3.21 Showing non-standardized and non-categorized courses 48 3.22 Showing a front size of transforming an email with no reason to 49

support 4.1 Michael Porter’s Three Generic Strategies showing company 55

positioning 4.2 Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s situational-leadership theory 57 5.1 Example of low performance communicating channel 69

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Company Background

A digital marketing company is Asia Pacific’ s leading Database Marketing Services Provider. The company helps organizations to create a positive customer experience and achieve customer centric marketing by utilizing technological solutions to optimize the use of customer data. This proven transformation process results from the integration of the company’s expertise in the development of innovative customer strategies, analytics, campaign automation, database design and development, and blends these capabilities with the business specific knowledge of the clients.

Established in 2003 and operating in multiple countries with more than 250 employees with over 23 nationalities. The company has been contributing to the success of an expanding breadth of clients including leading companies in financial services, telecommunications, retail, motoring services, media, and other industry sectors. The company’s team of professionals are dedicated to working with clients to improve their marketing efficiency and to capture latent customer value. The company sets an agenda to drive transformation across the industry through data driven marketing. The company has worked alongside numerous brands across the region to keep them well ahead of their competitors and help them to consistently satisfy their own customers by ensuring they remain customer-centric and relevant.

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1.2 Business process

The company is servicing several clients through their industry teams. Business process for each team each client might be difference depends what each client would like to work and how they normally work but the idea is quite similar which is once a client would like to build a marketing campaign using their customer data driven. They will firstly ask analytic team to analyze on their customer data. The analytic team will provide clients with thousands of possible customer data points, all of which could potentially be considered when it comes time to make critical marketing decisions. Once they can decide on what campaigns they want to make. The company consultancy team will discuss criteria and requirement and start drafting campaign briefs. Their consultancy will also help the client to complete the campaign brief by filling in technical criteria. After the completing the campaign brief, they will send the brief over to 2 teams. First, Message stream team to develop, design, implement and testing creative for visualizing the client what will be the massage customers will receive. Their message steam team develops creative by using their creative tool based on HTML language. Main communication channels that require creative are Email and Direct Mail. They also build landing pages and surveys if there is a campaign requires those. In the meantime, Campaign development team will start building a campaign on IBM Unica Campaign Application. Not just building the campaign. Teams also give feedbacks on campaigns to the client during the build about how to improve campaign performance and accuracy. Once campaigns are built and next step is execution. The company does not execute campaigns manually. Manual works are replaced with marketing automation, which enables marketers to focus on the customer-centric strategies, increase the speed-to-market, and minimize operational tasks. The company normally runs campaigns at night while their employees are not working for the best running performance. The company’s support team in Nanjing who works 24 hours 7 days a week will closely monitor campaign executions. After the campaigns are launched. The client can track how the campaign performance is going. Customer responses are monitored to measure the success of a marketing campaign. Along with customer click- through and open rates, the no-

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response is also tracked to analyze the effectiveness of the campaign and adjust the approach provided by reporting team.

Figure 1.1 Company overview primary business process 1.3 Products and services

The company utilizes best in class applications that simplify and automate their marketing processes to free you from day- to-day operation tasks. The company uses customer data for detecting trigger and event. The platform is running automatically and send a message to eligible customers through multichannel communications and measure the performance to improve the campaign accuracy. The main marketing tool the company uses for servicing their clients is IBM Campaign, formerly Unica Campaign which will be supported by other team for example Customer Analytic team that can deliver actionable insights gained from a variety of advanced analytical modeling techniques that meet business specific needs or segments customer target groups, find criteria or event base for triggering campaigns.

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1.4 Goals

Company’s vision, mission, and Value Propositions for operating as follows 1.4.1 Vision

The company has a vision to drive customer- centric transformation by automating a frictionless synergy between data intelligence and dynamic decisioning. With this in mind, the company has invested heavily in areas that have helped answer the biggest pain points of their clients and the industry.

1.4.2 Mission By establishing a trusted partner relationship with each of clients, the

company continues many missions to achieve shared goals through customer-centric decisioning and transforming their communications.

1.4.2.1 Mission to their clients To be the partner of choice by establishing a one- team

relationship, that challenges the status quo from a solid foundation of technology and experience, to achieve shared goals through customer- centric transformation. The company knows that people are at the heart of their relationships, so they are committed to protecting, developing, and advancing their personal outcomes to become industry leaders.

1.4.2.2 Mission to their industry The company constantly invests in innovation to find new and

interesting ways to do things to drive continuous marketing transformation. 1.4.2.3 Mission to their employees

The company is committed to create a safe learning environment, where their people can be curious, fearlessly challenge the status quo, and drive marketing transformation.

1.4.3 Value Propositions Leverage their employees, processes, technology, and vision that

challenge the status quo to transform client's marketing without risking their investment.

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1.5 Future competition

The company is constantly looking into the future, trying to predict the next big trend, be it for their brands or their clients. Naturally, they are preoccupied with questions like: What is the next big campaign? How can we turn their client into the next big thing? What is the next hot trend going to be in retail? Knowing this, what do some of the top minds in marketing predict for their own futures? This is a presentation by their CEO is explaining about the future enterprise.

“ Utilize open data to enhance value potential and create more opportunity of big data analytics to raise productivity and create new relevant offers. We need to apply advanced analytics to a combination of open and proprietary data to ultimately determine what the recommended targeting criteria for the campaign should be. Relationship and relevancy begin with listening. Trigger and event detection are the key to an opportunity to initiate the conversation with their customers. All offline and online transactions count and use them to identify who is the right fit for a certain offer and ensure their communications are relevant. Automation helps you move faster and allows you to sail in a sea of customer data like a champion.”

Figure 1.2 What the CEO explains about the future enterprise 1.6 Company Departments

In the past, everything went through each team. Campaign teams, Business Analysts, Testers, and Developers make decisions based on their team experience.

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However, in 2016, The Company has restructured. There is now more collaboration among the industry teams which consist of many roles in the team.

1.6.1 Management

To improve the management of the company and to gain greater participation into the management of the company and create a Strategy Board for the company and Management Councils for each Division. The purpose of the Strategy Board is to translate the company’ s overall strategy into a 12-month plan and to establish the metrics to measure the delivery of that plan. The Strategy Board with then work with each of the Division Boards (Relationship Division, Campaign Division, Project Division, Operations Division, Support Division) , on which parts for the strategy belongs to each Division Board and what metrics are they responsible for.

1.6.2 Client Services To significantly improve the marketing performance of their clients

by using a proactive, strategic approach to campaign development that adds ongoing value and stops dumb campaigns. This department has been broken down to silos base on client’ s industries and consist of many roles in each team e. g. campaign developer, developers, business analyst, testers.

1.6.3 Corporate Support 1.6.3.1 Legal

Provide legal advice and support to the company, and manage legal risk to ensure proper documentation of agreements with customers and suppliers, compliance with the law and to minimize exposure to legal risk.

1.6.3.2 Finance Ensure that the company’s financial records are accurate and

reliable and delivered in a timely manner and to support the business, grow the business and for compliance purposes.

1.6.3.3 Talent and Team Development Maximize people value to equip people with skills,

knowledge, experiences, opportunities, and tools to drive the company forward effectively and efficiently.

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1.6.4 Operations 1.6.4.1 Campaign Operations

Make sure campaigns are running quick and stable so client campaigns can be delivered as expected.

1.6.4.2 Infrastructure Operations Maintain and expand their infrastructure and make sure that

all processes complete without problems. 1.6.4.3 Load Operations

Make sure every load is built by efficiency, reliability and standardization and review for project team and support team.

1.6.5 Product Innovations - Identify and assess new capabilities and gaps in current

capabilities and develop applications to server requirements and vision of the company’ s business, improve existing application and development processes, and rule out problems, provide internal support and solutions for special requirements, provide internal training and knowledge sharing for products they develop

1.6.6 Sales and Marketing 1.6.6.1 Marketing

Plan and execute marketing strategy and activities for the company and specific the company products, to drive the company, service, the company products awareness and sales growth

1.6.6.2 Collage Design to overcome the challenges, improve user experience

by design, and provide design and creative training and support 1.6.6.3 Business Development

Assist their companies acquire new customers and sell additional products or services to existing ones

1.6.7 Strategy 1.6.7.1 Strategy

Work in a business to determine where the business is going and how it will get there. Strategy discussions encompass the purpose and values of

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the organization, and focus on setting medium-term and long-term goals. This role is usually found in large, commercial businesses. The strategy director reports directly to senior management and may even be a member of the management team. The director may work with a small team of analysts and support staff.

1.6.7.2 Analytics To ensure clients are making the most of the data that they

have, ensure the company is adding value to their client’ s marketing investment, ensure the company is contributing to their mission to make clients as successful as can be, ensure stakeholders are informed

1.6.7.3 Reporting All things Reporting and Data Visualization and ensure that for

every campaign the company sends that results can easily and quickly be analyzed from automated dashboards and reports.

1.6.8 Support Answer client’s queries, resolve client’s incidents and monitor the

database or loads and campaign operation, to ensure things are running smoothly for client’s campaigns to go out on time. Be a single point of contact via dedicated client-specific distribution list. To ensure campaign delivery expectations are met, continuous improvement to BAU processes with maintaining client relationship to gain client's confidence and reliance on the company’s expertise.

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Figure 1.3 Company’s organization chart 1.7 Number of employees

Number of employees of the company segment on department as the table below Table 1.1 Number of the company employees from date 25 May 2017

Department Number of employees Percentages Management 6 2.88 Client Services 79 37.38 Corporate Support 19 9.13 Operations 30 14.42 Product 20 9.62 Sales and Marketing 15 7.21 Strategy 17 8.17 Support 22 10.58 Total 208 100

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1.8 Future Plan

The company is transitioning from a focus as a typical service provider to a decisioning company this is what is behind the slimming down of the implementation process and ramping up investments in product development. This move they believe will put them at the center of where they see the value growth in the market. The more traditional marketing automation market will continue to grow but it will be increasingly difficult to create value in this market as it heads to commoditization. The company is already seeing this with some of the smaller integrators and service providers being squeezed. Most of the opportunities they are now winning through the new products are more heavily dependent on a Strategy and Decisioning offering than ever before. The company will continue to enter new markets that are less developed than Australia and utilize their scale and expertise to create opportunities. The company is already seeing the benefits of this in some of their sales opportunities in Asia, where the company stand alone in having a proven track record. Their current business is significant, and they need to continue to drive improvement through it. It is also critical that any business that we operate be as efficient as possible as this is a strong protection against any adverse movements in the market. If they have a very efficient business then even if the market moves against them, they are the most likely player to survive. Adverse markets remove the weak first. They are trying to grow the revenue by 25 percent per year over the next 3 years, but this is a significant challenge and although they are now beginning to get sales momentum it is taken longer than they expected. However, because their business mix is changing they do not expect their headcount to increase by the same amount, they would think their head count will rise by about 10-15 percent per year. According to that the significant problem they are facing is a very high turnover rate. In the past 3 years the number of new employees is 294 while the number of people who left is 267. In 2016, they lost numbers of people from the company Bangkok as the BKK product development team has been moved to Sydney that means the company can only increase 10 percent of employees in the last 3 years as shown.

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Table 1.2 Number of new joiners and leavers from 2014-2016

Figure 1.4 Showing number of employees that joined and left in the last 4 years

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CHAPTER 2 ANALYSIS

In this chapter will analyze company which consist of customer analysis,

competitor analysis, internal and external factors that effect to company with using the models as follows Five Forces Analysis, SWOT Analysis and PEST Analysis for understanding internal and external environments for improving company strategic plan. 2.1 Current Situation

One of the first things that will strike you at the company is the very few rules. In place of widespread rules and regulations. They trust that their employees will always do the right thing, that they will protect and nurture their team. The placement of trust over rules is a vital aspect of their culture; the company defends their choice to have a trust based culture over one based on rules. Indeed, their preference is to remove the need for the rule, rather than impose a rule over everyone. This does not mean, however, that they do not have any rules. They do have a few, but these are mostly an expression of common sense.

A simple but potent example of this is internet usage. At the company there are no restrictions, you can log in to Facebook, YouTube etc. and their people do use these websites but must be in the regular rules in HR handbook. Many organizations impose restrictions on these sites to avoid staff being distracted from their work during work time. They do not, and will not because they trust people to use the Internet in a way that does not adversely affect their work. There is a direct relationship between the amount of time spent on these sites and their work effectiveness, extended use does not make them more effective. On occasions, they have had people who spent lots of time on these sites and there has been pressure to block the sites.

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They believe that it is important to have passion for what employees do. If they are passionate about their work, they will naturally strive to be successful. This is why rules are few and far between. They do not want to inhibit employee creativity and innovation. Things that need to be done get done because people are enthusiastic and excited about their work. Be passionate about what they do, take initiative, contribute, and make things happen. And when people get bored with their jobs. The company has a lot of opportunities to move roles. That helps people to learn new things everyday even in a day that they think they are enough for leaning things.

They protect, support, and nurture their employees and expect them to do the same for their team and the company. Building teams is about finding people who have the right capability, but success is mostly about attitude and behaviors. Really bright people with the wrong attitude can be the most divisive and problematic team members. Of course, they always need to make sure that the people the company recruits into teams have what it takes to get the job done, but very close attention should be paid to their attitude to work. At the company, it is more important HOW they do something, over WHAT they do.

They define their employees to 3 types. They define and do to each type of employees differently.

1. People who turn up These people think work is like high school, you turn up, get your name

marked off and in 6 years you leave. Some people will do better than others but their main objective is to get it finished. These are the people who pack up and leave religiously at 5. 30 p. m. They are time, not task orientated. They put off completing things and find ways around not actually delivering anything outside what has been specifically requested.

When they apply pressure, they will usually come up with the goods. Constant output will however require constant pressure, and they will always be fighting their overwhelming temptation to wait for time to pass by. These people show very little initiative to take on tasks and make things happen. They may be friendly and sociable, but do not be fooled, when things do not get done there will always be an excuse or someone else they blame.

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What the company does to these people: reassess or rescope 2. Process workers

Process workers are conscientious, they work diligently at the tasks they are given and can be relied upon to deliver what is required. As long as it does not require extension beyond the normal working day. If these individuals are put under pressure, they will work the required hours to meet the deadline but see that as something special. A process worker will usually take every opportunity to mention the 14-hour day they did last month, but probably will not remember the 6-hour day when they left early or had a long lunch. These people usually do not come looking for additional work. If the workload is light, they leave early or string out existing tasks. This group is most likely to complain that they are under-remunerated or are not given opportunities. What the company does to this people: keep and manage them, and manage their expectations

3. The Achievers These guys are GOLD, they show initiative and make things happen.

They are constantly on the lookout for things to do and things to learn from. They make their role bigger by taking things on; they look for responsibility and are excited about the opportunity to get things done. They hunger for the sense of achievement they enjoy from completing something. Things get done with people like this, even when others have said ‘ it cannot be done’ . They need to manage these people carefully, they tend to take on too much and they take on another people’ s work, making it difficult to see who is performing and who is lingering. This type of person develops very quickly, so their learning needs to be managed to ensure that they do not become over extended; at the same time, they need to be sufficiently stretched and challenged to maintain their interest and engagement. It is easy overlook their generous efforts, because despite their workload they are much less likely to complain than either of the other two groups. These are the people who walk in one day out of the blue and resign. What the company do to this people: nurture them, make sure that they are recognized and given opportunities they are not quite ready for? Or promote them,

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even if they think that this will upset a co-worker in another group who has been there longer or is more qualified? Should they promote them regardless? Be careful not to over stretch them. All above are from the company HR handbook written by the CEO of the company. 2.2 Current Problems

2.2.1 Culture They are a multinational company, they have over 23 nationalities

of employees across 6 countries. Their attitudes and behaviors of employees tend to be more diverse. Some cultures place more emphasis on universal commitments, such as honesty, while others put a higher value on relationships. The potential for misunderstanding can be high in multinational companies. This can be mitigated with training, awareness campaigns and leadership commitment to embracing diversity.

Language is a significant obstacle for the company. The solution is not just a matter of learning the language. For example, dialect, slang, and pronunciation. Language also has contextual nuances and nonverbal dimensions that change meaning. Also, not all foreign words and phrases are translatable. That also leads misunderstanding. When they work with other cultures, it is easy to be influenced by common stereotypes, misconceptions, and prejudices about their new colleagues. They carry those misconceptions and stereotypes without realizing it into meetings, trainings that made communication difficult and hard work. They have a lot of meetings in a day. The office in Bangkok has 9 meeting rooms and that is not even enough for them. They are running a lot of meetings with people from different countries all the time.

2.2.2 Asian clients There is only one Asian client. Sales in developed country like

Australia should not be the same as developing countries like Thailand. It is all too easy for brands to miss their target by being blind to Asia’s diversity and growth. Instead of categorizing it as one region, they need to get to know each individual market. Only

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when brands understand how to connect with their audience, will they have the potential to transform attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

2.2.3 Turnover rate As mentioned in the chapter 1, the company has a high turnover

rate. Consistently high rates of turnover can cost the company a lot of money and time. The most well- known problem caused by high job turnover rates is that the company is always looking to hire and train new employees. However, there are a lot of other issues that are caused by high employee turnover, and these impacts their current staff that is been willing to stand by the company. Seniors and colleagues are often left to cover until a new employee is hired and begins working. The new employees may take several months to fully learn the job and achieve competency in the position. The overall productivity of the workplace tends to decrease with high turnover. Since a new employee has a period of adjustment, they will not complete tasks as quickly as the person they replace. Group projects that rely on the new team member may slow down, which affects experienced employee’ s productivity levels. The loss of momentum when an employee resigns may also affect morale. When a group of employees learns to work well together, only to have one or more members leave. This leaves the staff in a bad situation until a new employee can starts.

2.2.4 Seasonal Workload Demanding for the clients follow a seasonal pattern or exhibit other

periodic variations. As long as the changes in demand are not permanent, there is no reason to hire more employees to cover the peak workload requirements especially for the company which they break teams into silos. This means while some teams are being busy, some might have very low billable tasks and full of idle time on their worksheets. Paying for this idle time is expensive and not reasonable. They have tried to eliminate the gap by planning overtime, discretionary work management, get temporary resources. The first two are manageable and controllable. The last one is uncontrollable though. People who do not have any background on accounts that they never worked with are tough to manage them to help even they have the same exact skills and using the same tool. If a team needs to get a resource to help, they

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need to have a training session before that resource can start which sometimes it is not worth to spend their time for trainings or having a session.

Table 2.1 Comparing while one team is busy, and the other team is having a slow week

2.3 Porter’s Five Forces Analysis

Porter’ s five forces analysis is a framework for analyzing the level of competition within an industry, digital marketing agencies in this case, and business strategy development. It draws upon industrial organization economics to derive five

LocationNo. of Required

Hours

No. of Logged

Hours

No. of Holiday

Hours

Total Billable

hours

Adjusted Billable

RateActual Utilisation

Targeted Billable

RateVariance

Auckland 38.00 38.16 0.00 17.00 44.74% 100.42% 30.00% 14.74%

Auckland 38.00 38.05 7.60 13.50 44.41% 100.12% 70.00% -25.59%

Auckland 24.00 33.00 0.00 3.00 12.50% 137.50% 30.00% -17.50%

Bangkok 40.00 32.90 0.00 21.90 54.75% 82.25% 70.00% -15.25%

Auckland 38.00 38.15 0.00 14.68 38.62% 100.39% 30.00% 8.62%

Auckland 30.40 40.75 0.00 21.00 69.08% 134.05% 70.00% -0.92%

Sydney 38.00 40.00 40.00 0.00 0.00% 105.26% 30.00% -30.00%

Bangkok 20.00 20.38 8.00 0.00 0.00% 101.88% 70.00% -70.00%

Sydney 19.00 19.00 0.00 6.70 35.26% 100.00% 70.00% -34.74%

Sydney 38.00 38.15 7.60 1.75 5.76% 100.39% 70.00% -64.24%

Bangkok 40.00 40.00 40.00 0.00 0.00% 100.00% 70.00% -70.00%

Bangkok 40.00 37.00 20.00 10.50 52.50% 92.50% 70.00% -17.50%

Sydney 38.00 46.50 8.00 11.00 36.67% 122.37% 70.00% -33.33%

Bangkok 40.00 35.40 4.00 13.90 38.61% 88.50% 70.00% -31.39%

Sydney 19.00 19.00 0.00 7.60 40.00% 100.00% 70.00% -30.00%

Total 500.40 516.43 135.20 142.53 39.03% 103.20% 65.00% -25.97%

LocationNo. of Required

Hours

No. of Logged

Hours

No. of Holiday

Hours

Total Billable

hours

Adjusted Billable

RateActual Utilisation

Targeted Billable

RateVariance

Sydney 38.00 38.00 0.00 37.80 99.47% 100.00% 70.00% 29.47%

Singapore 40.00 39.60 0.00 30.60 76.50% 99.00% 70.00% 6.50%

Melbourne 38.00 38.50 0.00 37.00 97.37% 101.32% 30.00% 67.37%

Sydney 38.00 46.00 0.00 35.00 92.11% 121.05% 70.00% 22.11%

Bangkok 40.00 53.40 0.00 53.40 133.50% 133.50% 70.00% 63.50%

Bangkok 40.00 40.75 8.00 31.75 99.22% 101.88% 30.00% 69.22%

Bangkok 40.00 35.34 4.00 26.07 72.41% 88.35% 70.00% 2.41%

Singapore 40.00 45.85 0.00 24.85 62.13% 114.63% 30.00% 32.13%

Bangkok 40.00 35.75 0.00 31.75 79.38% 89.38% 70.00% 9.38%

Total 354.00 373.19 12.00 308.22 90.12% 105.42% 65.00% 25.12%

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forces that determine the competitive intensity and therefore the attractiveness of an industry.

2.3.1 Threat of New Entrants

In digital era, full service agencies have high demand in the market as everyone notices that it is easier, cheaper, more efficient and cost of setting up a digital agency is lower than do it themselves so getting a full- service agency to look after this kind of work is so attractive. Tones of people and companies want to jump to play in the market due to the reason. Especially in Australia where is the revenue per a project price is very interested. Although agencies need to invest a huge amount in backend function like technology. Getting clients in the initial stage is a bit difficult, because clients will usually look the experience of agency.

Figure 2.1 Average Project Price by country Impact to the company: Increasing of new competitors is not good. The market tends to be a red ocean in very near future.

2.3.2 Threat of Substitute Service The threats of substitutes are interesting considerations in

developing strategy. Thinking more broadly about the function and benefit we are delivering and how that may be delivered by substitutes that they had not even considered previously. They need to consider the differentiation and value of their

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offering. In effect, it asks us to consider the complete user journey and every touch point over the long term rather than purely looking at things through a direct response lens. Substitutes are too popular among companies ( clients of agencies) . They have high demand lately and seems increasing through the years. Among of similar agency companies i. e. medias that can also build a relationship between customers and the company as well. Lacking some channels e. g. Television, Radio or social should be considered as the biggest substitute in the market. Another kind of substitute is research companies that they can also do researches for giving customer answers about what they have to do. A research company can reflect customer’s insight from many ways such as questioners. That can prove about what customers thinking about their companies and then they can make a plan to do something with their targeted customers.

Impact to the company: the company might take this opportunity to expand the market by creating a new department for market researching.

2.3.3 Bargaining Power of Buyer Clients (customers) are extremely empowered in the digital age, and

this is largely a result of the availability of information as well as the accessibility to alternatives. This reminds them to focus their energies on being the source of much of this information. Consider this as an argument to engage in content marketing to help influence this over time. Clients will choose agencies which have good experience in industry. Making some mistakes and showing them unprofessional might trigger them to not renew the contact easily.

Impact to the company: Without clients ( customers) , the company cannot survive. Their first priority is maintaining customer relationship and do not stop do find new customers or trying to play in a new market with new target groups.

2.3.4 Bargaining Power of Supplier The bargaining power of suppliers is an interesting force in digital era.

For several years, it was the near monopoly situation that we have faced with Google and IBM. This is the biggest challenge that most businesses have had to face, and this

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has led to widespread offence industry-wide. I think things are changing, the way the strategist thinks about this force in digital marketing is to consider a longer term multi-touch strategy as opposed to focusing purely on last touch ROI. Currently there are lot of suppliers are available in the market.

Impact to the company: Low, the company has a potential to develop or buy a product (software). As they have experiences about digital marketing already.

2.3.5 Rivalry among existing competition Understanding competitor advertising spend is more difficult in digital

marketing. Digital marketing platforms are quite unreliable with this type of information, but look for independent third-party tools to gain a degree of information. Again, many of these tools look at rate card costs, which few advertisers are paying, but they at least provide a benchmark. They need to consider not only those that have traditionally been their competitors, but also those firms that their audience think are competitors. The implication here is to think more broadly than our narrow idea of what their brand represents, and to think of the different ways that people interpret it. Existing competitors have high profile clients and clients loyal toward them. Most of the traditional agencies are now concentrating in digital also. There are some Australian companies that are able to deliver similar things as DA. Even they are using different tools e.g. Adobe marketing cloud to replace Unica IBM. Salesforce to replace Message Stream that using Extract target for sending emails. They can do pretty much the same thing as the company can as per examples below.

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Figure 2.2 DataRati – An Australian Digital marketing agency

Figure 2.3 BlueStar – An Australian Digital marketing agency

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Figure 2.4 Quantium – An Australian Digital marketing agency Impact to the company: Not just the company that getting better every day. Their competitors also want to become the best of the market as well. 2.4 SWOT Analysis

SWOT is widely accepted tool due to its simplicity and value of focusing on the key issues which affect the firm. The aim of SWOT is to identify the strengths and weaknesses that are relevant in meeting opportunities and threats in particular situation. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the company and can be directly managed by it, while the opportunities and threats are external and the company can only anticipate and react to them.

2.4.1 Strengths

2. 4. 1. 1 The core strength lies in the power of their team; their workforce. They have a team of creative, result driven and highly proficient digital marketing expert, a team with excellent qualifications and experience various niche areas in the digital marketing agencies industry and other related industry. Those people are not just working great but they also be a good mentor and a good leader. When the company has new joiners, those people always guide them how to be a good worker. They are not just great, they also have a right attitude and most of them are still in operation level because of the flat company design which make them to

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work closer to new joiners. The company claims this as their strength when they present the company. They always confidently say that they have a great team, great resource to operate.

2.4.1.2 The company is one of the market leaders in Asia Pacific. They service wide range of industries. They have a lot of clients from varies of industries and that made they have a lot of experiences from several industries. They make 1 billion marketing decisions executed each year for delivering 60 million customers in their preferred channel that made 200 million transactions processed daily. The company has splitting their teams based on industries which are Telco, Media, Retail, Banking, and Financial services.

2. 4. 1. 3 The company has a strong consumer- centric solution. They can focus on quality content over quantity. It is easy to target and reach more audience at a cheaper price. Campaigns can be easily customized and made more targeted as per their business requirements. As the world is more dependent on the internet, it helps the business to reach out and connect with the people on a larger scale. That saves a lot of money as compared to the traditional way of marketing as it is cheaper and efficient. Entrepreneurs find it very useful as they do not need a huge budget for this and it gives them huge platform to make a mark on the digital world. They do not require a large team to do digital marketing campaigns unlike the traditional manner which in turn saves money, time and labor and also increases the ROI. This is a feedback from many clients that the company has a solution that powerful and rarely to find in the market.

Figure 2.5 A new product that focus on quality content over quantity

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2.4.2 Weaknesses 2. 4. 2. 1 The company is a giant in Australia but it been treated as a

new digital marketing agency outside Australia especially when their goal is to get more Asian clients, it might take some time for them to break into the market and gain acceptance especially from top profile Asian clients in the already saturated and highly competitive digital marketing agencies industry; that is perhaps their major weakness especially when they are trying to play in the Asian market where the requirements e. g. price concerns may totally different with Australia. I had a lot of conversations with sales persons. They said that it’s very difficult to sale the company’s solution in Thailand. Database marketing is not that popular and the executives do not inserted in database marketing just yet.

2.4.2.2 There is a high chance of failure of digital marketing campaigns. Because of confusion due to the availability of many different marketing options. Their client need of deep understanding of changing human behavior and requirements to make the business model can survive. If their products are not justifying the clients need, then the chance of getting bad reviews in public is very high, which in turn might damage the reputation.

2. 4. 2. 3 Keeping pace with new trends and technology. There are so many data management tools out there in the market. Data Analysis is still a very big concern and very few people are professional in it as few are able to understand what data actually says. Some say big data is coming, we need to prepare. Some say Big data is a bit too far, the concept is not clear enough, no proper big data enterprise-level software in the market right now.

2.4.3 Opportunities 2. 4. 3. 1 The opportunities available in the digital marketing agencies

industry is massive. It is the pretty large numbers of people who use the internet on a daily basis and own smart phones and other related gadgets and that number is increasing every single day. Not just the number of internet users that is increasing the period of time that people are spending to the internet is also increasing significantly.

2. 4. 3. 2 Customer preferences, features, and brand opportunities will continue to surprise us. There will be changes this year and beyond. As social becomes

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more associated, it is time for the marketers to keep their eyes on the strategies to remain ahead of the competitors. Create something that entices individuals, target the right audience, and then sustain the momentum with a marketing campaign to come within a reach of more people.

2. 4. 3. 3 Digital marketing is about understanding your customers. Brands construct a range of touch points both online and offline at which users leave a trail of data. Smart companies know how to obtain permission, harvest, and then extract full value from that data. With the emergence of the Internet of Things, there will be more data than ever. This is a massive opportunity for brand owners and specifically for those who choose Analytics as a career. Recruitment consultants are crying out for following people: data analyst, data scientist, CRO specialist, insights director.

2. 4. 3. 4 Latest digital technologies are all around us and faster than ever. If the organizations use them effectively, it will generate a significant competitive advantage. This will give the employees new digital skills to adapt and render them with the most relevant platforms, tools, and motivations. Some of the technologies driving the digital workplace are production studio technology, immersive technologies, personal clouds, etc.

2. 4. 3. 5 One area that will continue to offer opportunities for transforming customer service, Artificial Intelligence brings huge shifts in how individuals notice and interact with technology. AI is creating smarter experience every day, from messaging platforms to imagining insights and machine learning. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, marketers can able to understand the human knowledge and experience. They can complete the most consuming human-actions in a fraction of a millisecond. Moreover, this technology will make it easier to extract all the information required for marketing the brand to the targeted viewers.

2.4.4 Threats 2.4.4.1 The arrival of digital marketing agencies or even a social media

marketing company in same location where their target market exists and who may want to adopt same business model like us. There is high intense competition in automation digital marketing, especially in developed countries like Australia.

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2.4.4.2 Big data trend is near. Storing, processing, and extracting value from data of all forms and sizes will be the standard of all organization. Security and privacy issues are magnified by velocity, volume, and variety of big data, such as large-scale cloud infrastructures, diversity of data sources and formats, streaming nature of data acquisition. Traditional security mechanisms, which are tailored to securing small-scale static data, are inadequate.

2. 4. 4. 3 With the growth of this digital platforms, customers have become more vocal about their feelings and opinions, and with the availability of this platform they have the power to damage as well as advocate for any brand, which is a high risk for the marketers. Analyzing the data in a wrong way can lead to damaging results which is found in a lot of companies. 2.5 PEST Analysis

The PEST analysis is a useful tool for understanding market growth or decline, and as such the position, potential and direction for a business. A PEST analysis is a business measurement tool. PEST is an acronym for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological factors, which are used to assess the market for a business or organizational unit.

2.5.1 Political Political factors can act as a barrier to many areas of a business’ s

marketing. Being aware of the Political climate in the areas the company is operating is hugely important, especially if they are operating in multiple nations or areas with significantly different political climates. For instance, Australian, Prime Minister has announced he is scrapping the controversial 457 visa program for skilled migrants as part of a bid to tackle unemployment. This might be a big impact to the company where they have a lot of foreigners working in the Australian offices. Back to Thailand and Singapore where the company exists in those two countries. Thailand and Singapore are in The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)seeks to promote economic growth and regional stability among its members through consultation,

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consensus, and cooperation based on the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC). This might be a good sign for expanding company to other countries or even getting more clients from ASEAN.

2.5.2 Economic Things like inflation rates, wage- law and purchasing power all have

direct impacts on ability to market yourself effectively. High inflation rates will make it hard to attract investment, fluctuating exchange rates not only impact your costs but also their ability to market competitively overseas. Especially when they are saying that they are looking for clients from outside Australia. There is differing economic situations require different Marketing strategies, the same product may be served best by being Marketed as Reliable, Well-Known and High Quality in a good economy but at the same time those might not be considered as a good thing in some countries.

2.5.3 Social and cultural While most companies have created buyer personas and have

gathered more details on demographic profiles of their customers to consider wider social implications, namely that it is not only their customers that will see their advertisements. Big companies can afford diverse focus groups but that is beyond the reach of most of us which means we must intelligently try to assess social factors to the best of their ability. This is especially important for businesses operating in across multiple nations and demographics once again. As media became digital it also changed the marketing channels and became more fragmented now they will become more specified.

Within a significantly short period of time, big data has evolved from being a hot topic of discussion in social to playing a most pivotal role across industries. The ability to mine big data for deep insights has radically altered the dynamics of the way businesses function, drive sales, and attract customers and has become an essential component of business strategy today. As businesses taste success by uncovering insights locked inside data.

2.5.4 Technological Digital Marketing is perhaps the quickest changing landscape when

talking about Marketing. Entire new avenues pop up should be exploited. New tools

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and concepts are developed. People realized that we can use any kinds of data to drive a marketing. There are changes to Social Media, Mobile Devices, Data Tracking Capabilities appear nearly overnight. Future Proofing is a term that is often used. It is impossible to completely future proof your Marketing, but every effort should be made to keep your Marketing flexible because you know how quickly things can change. It is not as simple as just jumping on every new technology. What we can do is only select the most eligible technology for the company than simply be doing all. Knowing what is a fad and what will stick is difficult and requires knowledge as well as the ability to stay abreast of new developments. 2.6 Summary

General speaking there are so many digital marketing agencies available in the market. The company might be the top digital marketing agency in APAC, but if they fail to sign clients, their business is dead in the water. The problem is, clients today are more demanding than ever. With the explosive growth of digital marketing and influencer marketing, suddenly everyone’ s a professional, which means solid competition in the market. There are new marketing tools and marketing concepts created every day. The clients do not care about what is the tool we use. They only care about the result which I personally believe that a good result does not only come from the marketing tool or the marketing concept, but it is from people. Think about if you have a super powerful marketing tool but your people do not know about marketing or you have a lot of marketing experts sit in your company, but those people do not know how to express their idea and deliver to the customer. After considering on the SWOT matrix. There is an interested point where thier strength is the company has a stong consumer-centric solution and the opputunity is every one needs to jump into the digtal marketing business and in the meantime their solusion does not work well outside Australia so they need to think about redesigning their product and customize it to be eligible for Asian clients. By doing that, after looked at their weaknesses, you might notice that they are just a new player in Asian market. No one knows the company and do not trust them and allow them to be a business partner.

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The number of leavers in each year also significantly reflect to something. The fact that they can keep good people in the company is true but in the meantime they might did not notice that people who leave the company also gone with some knowledge that people they kept do not have.

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CHAPTER 3 CURRENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

For getting a good strategic plan besides employee resources, information

system can also give us a clearer view that we can see through problems and can create a plan for getting new and existing technology to support and increase work efficiency.

To connect many distant employees at once, all the company office locations are being able to access the same network resources. The idea is to have a centralized location that would house the core infrastructure needed to establish the network, such as the servers and databases. Branch offices, on the other hand, require no such infrastructure; the remote offices link to the mother ship via a specific type of connection i. e. Virtual private network (VPN) . Says each office have an individual network infrastructure but all of them can access to the ‘centralized location’. VPNs, which provide secure connections between individual users and the network over the Internet, have several upsides. They provide more secure site-to-site connections, they transfer information much faster than WANs, and most importantly to a medium-sized company, and VPNs are much less expensive, since they can use a single leased line to the Internet for each office, cutting down on broadband costs.

All of the information systems are web-based systems. Employees are using Web browser such as Internet Explorer or Google Chrome for accessing. They did not develop the information systems by their own. A bespoke web based office system using third party can automate business processes, freeing their time up to focus on their business. It can also eliminate inefficiencies in the company current business operations, allowing business resource to be reallocated to more proactive activities and profitable areas of the business. Naturally this can potentially lead to savings in the form of staff wages, reduced inefficiency, increased sales, and increased profitability.

The company has implemented some information systems for increasing work efficiency and has a dedicated team to support and monitor the system.

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This report does not include some information technology systems such as Kxen for Analytics, Tableau for reporting, initiate for customer matching or Syncsort for data transformation as they are used less often than the systems I will mention below. 3.1 System information team structure

They have dedicated teams mostly working in Nanjing and Sydney. In Nanjing, they are operating 24 hours, 7 days per week which are spitted to 2 shifts, day, and night. There are 4 System Administrators, 3 Database Administrators and 3 Load operations working in Nanjing. Those people are responsible for and maintain the computer system that located in Sydney. The actual physical server is in Sydney. The team must remote to the server for working. The reason behind this is most of the clients do not want their data to be transferred to other countries. As mentioned in the Chapter 1. Unica is a web access control platform that installed to a dedicated server for operation which using data from another server that located in the same location.

There are 4 (Internal) System Administrators and IT Supports that monitor and maintain the computer systems and networks of an organization. They also install and configure computer systems, diagnose hardware and software faults, and solve technical and applications problems, either over the phone or in person. They are working with a Network Administrator in Sydney to install network and computer systems. Maintaining, repairing, and upgrading network and computer system.

Figure 3.1 System information team structure

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3.2 Current Systems

As with all companies, The Company has many systems to manage different things. Below is a list of what systems the company uses and why they use them.

Table 3.1 Information system and application in the company

System Description

DaVinci Company’s intranet where the following information is stored:

All client related documentation related to technical implementation or process.

All documentation on the company internal processes, learning and company information

Autotask This is where all the company staff log their timesheets. All work in the company must have an Autotask key to log time to.

Namely This is where all the company staff information is held for HR purposes. Quarterly and Yearly reviews are also managed via Namely.

Kudos This is the real-time recognition and rewards system. Go here to leave positive feedback and appreciation for those in the company who have made a difference to their work life.

iLearn This is where all the company staff can improve their soft and technical skills by courses provided and created by their own.

Message Stream

A platform of creative creative e.g. Direct mail, Emails and SMS for visualizing campaign offers or marketing messages.

Unica Suite A platform of the omni-channel marketing and real-time personalization capabilities that the company uses this tool to help clients to create marketing campaigns

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Figure 3.2 Showing the systems that are in VPN and external systems that can access from anywhere

3.2.1 DaVinci DaVinci is an online discussion site where the company employees

can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They can share any work and non- work- related topics e. g. business cases, knowledge sharing, company announcements. Besides that, DaVinci is also a place for holding documents, client details, contacts, technical specifications, change requests. DaVinci is compatible for many media types. Concisely, DaVinci is the single source of truth. DaVinci gives them a central place to keep their team's work organized and accessible, making it easier to find the information needed to keep work moving forward. It captures, stores, and grows their team's knowledge so they can stay up to date and on the same page literally. The company can create, share, and collaborate on projects all in DaVinci to keep their projects moving forward. It is hosted by the company and powered by Atlassian Confluence.

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Figure 3.3 DaVinci home page showing recent activities

Figure 3.4 An example for a best practice in DaVinci

3.2.2 Autotask Autotask is a platform that runs the company critical business

functions, including: expense management, service desk, project management, CRM, and time & billing. It is designed for technology solution providers with multiple clients using extensive network infrastructures.

As a service desk, Autotask features SLA management and allows the company to keep customer notes, contracts, emails, and incidents in a single location to help them settle disputes or issues faster and more accurately. Likewise, Autotask

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helps the company to manage different SLA levels and monitor each agreements details with automated alerts, work flows, and escalation paths. Its SLA module integrates with accounting for faster billing. To keep you on top of high-priority SLA issues, the solution delivers real- time updates and alerts. Autotask also features a built- in project management module to keep the company service delivery on time, within budget, and measurable down to their targets. They can measure a project’ s profitability with increased visibility of cost-efficiency, and collaborate with the right people for the right tasks while generating real- time data. The main function that all the company employees must use is timesheet. They must put their efforts into timesheets for billing them to clients. Timesheets also show the available resources. Project managers use another function to allocate resources and it also helps them to see available resources by looking at timesheets.

Figure 3.5 Showing my time sheet for the week commencing of 7 July 2017

3.2.3 Namely Namely enables the 360- degree review paradigm where employees

receive feedback from immediate co- workers as well as their managers. Namely focuses heavily on goal setting as a prerequisite for performance reviews, giving

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managers the ability to revisit goal tracking as often as they like along with the ability to adjust goals and job priorities as both the employee’ s and the business’ s needs change. Namely tracks employee skills via Competencies, allowing HR administrators to create Competencies, assign requirements, employee profiles, and surface those competencies when needed. It includes a calendar, directory and organization chart, employee profiles and personnel records, newsfeed, onboarding, performance management and goals, task manager, and time-off manager. A manager’s springboard list includes an Admin Tools, with functions for onboarding new employees, conducting reviews, running reports, and exporting data to other programs.

Figure 3.6 Showing my Personal Development Plan

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Figure 3.7 Showing requesting time off page

3.2.4 Kudos Kudos is both a visual representation of the values and

characteristics for which each employee are most recognized in Kudos, and an illustration of their level of engagement. Its core grows as they give. Their Kudos is who they are, what they excel at, and how they interact with their peers, all rolled up into one. It is all that and some secret sauce. Kudos simplifies recognition programming, making manual delivery and approvals a thing of the past. It allows you to give meaningful appreciation and awards in a social way, right away to reinforce the values that equal success. It allows you to give Kudos points to their colleagues instead of saying ‘thank you’. The point also reflects which value you are good. There are 5 core values at the company which are Be Awesome, Be Determined, Be Caring, Be Curious, and Be Honest. The company employees can redeem the point with rewards based on their location.

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Figure 3.8 Kudos visualizing my personality based on my colleague’s feedbacks

3.2.5 iLearn A learning management system targeted at providing centralized

internal learning programs for their Human Resources and IS&T departments. Their business requirements included support for blended learning delivery of leadership and management programs, self-paced delivery of global on boarding and technical courses, assessment, and certification testing, along with tracking and reporting of learner progress. They create content by their own. The system supports for a variety of media types such as: web- page, embedding streaming videos e. g. YouTube, documents e.g. PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and external content provider. The company assigned some of their employees to create contents by selecting potential and skillful employees. Ideally the company has locked down those resource for 50 percent. First 50 percent means do what they are responsible for and the other 50 percent is dedicated for creating content in iLearn. That group of people call themselves as ‘MOL’ also known as Minister of Learning. MOL is selected from each team to cover all possible courses and contents according to their role.

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Figure 3.9 Showing all available course in iLearn

3.2.6 Message Stream Protocol Message Stream is a multichannel marketing fulfillment platform

which is designed to streamline the creation and production of communication. The company uses Message Stream to create the marketing communication and send them out to customers and simplify the creation of the marketing message through multiple channels e.g. Direct mail, Email, SMS, etc. Message Stream is integrated to Unica and automated production process so messages are automatically generated when a campaign executes and delivered to customers. They can currently create direct mails, emails, mobile messages, or SMS through a single interface called Message Stream Portal or MSP.

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Figure 3.10 Showing MSP home page

Figure 3.11 Showing an example of creating an email creative with a simple text output

3.2.7 IBM Unica Suite IBM Unica suite is a suite of Web- based Marketing products that

heavily leveraged by the company, although they still only use a small section of the suite. Most products unified by a central marketing Datamart to facilitate more customer-centric marketing. Unica Campaign is a Web-based Marketing solution. It is an interface to access a Marketing Database of customer data and enables users to design, build, execute, analyze, and maintain automated Marketing Campaigns. The

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processes, which are the building blocks for campaign flowcharts, are the heart of IBM Campaign, as they perform the actual data manipulation, scheduling, offer matching, list generation, and optimization; in effect, you use the processes to define and implement a campaign.

There are other components besides campaign that are optional e.g. contact optimize that allows you to select the best campaign to deliver to customers so if a customer is eligible for many campaigns in a day. Optimize will select the best campaign or offer to send out.

Figure 3.12 Showing all available IBM Unica components that can be integrated to IBM Unica campaign.

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Figure 3.13 showing an interface for building a campaign 3.3 System information resources

Extranet systems like Kudos and Namely are hosted by third party companies and all internal systems like Unica and MSP are hosted by a company in Sydney. This report will not mention about external systems, the following details will be about the internal system infrastructure. They have a cluster and vCenter. VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for managing their VMware vSphere environments. They can use the features of VMware to manage servers such as migration, clone, snapshot. For the SFTP servers, they virtualize two devices into one to achieve a redundant backup function.

Originally the company used “Pizza box” servers with some larger ones and they moved to “blade” servers with external storage (SAN) in 2009 and increasing to 3 SANS's in 2013. It is physical to virtual servers with over 800 servers since 2003. Their main business operating system is Linux. Their system administrator team uses

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VMware to access and manage the server online from Sydney and Nanjing office. They have larger DB’s introducing SSD and grown to around 120 TB since 2003.

Figure 3.14 Showing storage growth from established to 2013

Their data center is the Tier 3 data center that has a LEED design rating of Gold with ASIO T4 “ Intruder Resistant” . The company has a separate Infrastructure which is going to be used to hold backups. Same Infrastructure can be scaled to offer cold site for clients that would like it for ultimate disaster. They are using server virtualization for the infrastructure of the second data center allows the physical servers in the second data center to be used for other functions (such as development or other less critical applications) until needed for their contact center applications. While agents and contacts are processed through a main data center, a second data center contains the infrastructure necessary to run the contact center application should the main data center become unavailable. However, the application remains offline there. Through manual backup processes or automatic Storage Area Network (SAN) replication technology, the application is periodically copied from the main data center to this second data center. After a loss of the main data center, the backup of the contact center application must be brought online at the second data center. Agents and contacts are then directed there for processing.

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Figure 3.15 Showing the idea of having cold standby site if the main data center cannot operate as usual

Figure 3.16 Showing independent networks of each locations connect to each other via internet

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Figure 3.17 Showing all internal systems mapping 3.4 Problems of the current information systems

Even though the company has 2 knowledge sharing systems which iLearn and DaVinci to be a repository of knowledge. The biggest problem is people. They do not use it often. Learning, providing, and sharing information can be obstructed by a lack of motivation. Employees do not receive or do not understand the surplus that comes along with cooperating on knowledge management. Spending time on non-related work does not make any senses to those people. Some people are keeping themselves in the comfort zone. They do not want to learn new things or do not want to create something for other colleagues just because it is not their responsibilities and that makes sense. The fact that humans always try to keep themselves in the comfort zone is undeniable. The priority of focusing on- time problems makes it difficult to focus on strategic activities like knowledge management. Personnel often do not seem to have the time for knowledge management procedures during day-to-day work.

As well as each organisation, also each individual no matter whether operative or strategic staff has different interests and hidden agendas which could be in opposition to a transparent knowledge management system. Valuable data generated by a group within an organization may need to be validated before being

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harvested and distributed. Keeping information current by eliminating wrong or old ideas is a constant battle.

After looked at timesheets from many teams. I noticed that some people are keeping them busy all the time. The time they spent in each day mostly are related to their work (billable works). This means they only come to the office just for working and then back home with getting new things. This does not mean those people are not good. In my point of them those people are excellent, they are busy because they are good at many things and they must handle and carry the team. I have highlighted of some noticeable numbers that showing some people are only come to the office just for working in the yellow highlighted in the Figures below.

Figure 3.18 Analysis of timesheets from Telco team

Figure 3.19 Analysis of timesheets from Retail team

LocationNo. of Required

Hours

No. of Logged

Hours

Total Billable

hours

Adjusted Billable

RateActual Utilisation

Targeted Billable

RateVariance

Sydney 38.00 40.50 22.50 59.21% 106.58% 70.00% -10.79%

Bangkok 40.00 40.00 38.00 95.00% 100.00% 70.00% 25.00%

Sydney 38.00 45.50 18.75 49.34% 119.74% 30.00% 19.34%

Sydney 19.00 19.10 15.33 80.66% 100.53% 70.00% 10.66%

Bangkok 40.00 40.88 18.55 46.38% 102.21% 70.00% -23.63%

Bangkok 40.00 41.50 40.00 100.00% 103.75% 70.00% 30.00%

Bangkok 40.00 42.00 29.50 81.94% 105.00% 70.00% 11.94%

Sydney 38.00 37.90 2.50 6.58% 99.74% 30.00% -23.42%

Bangkok 40.00 39.00 19.00 47.50% 97.50% 70.00% -22.50%

Sydney 19.00 19.00 9.30 48.95% 100.00% 30.00% 18.95%

LocationNo. of Required

Hours

No. of Logged

Hours

Total Billable

hours

Adjusted Billable

RateActual Utilisation

Targeted Billable

RateVariance

Sydney 38.00 38.00 37.80 99.47% 100.00% 70.00% 29.47%

Singapore 40.00 39.60 30.60 76.50% 99.00% 70.00% 6.50%

Melbourne 38.00 38.50 37.00 97.37% 101.32% 30.00% 67.37%

Sydney 38.00 46.00 35.00 92.11% 121.05% 70.00% 22.11%

Bangkok 40.00 53.40 53.40 133.50% 133.50% 70.00% 63.50%

Bangkok 40.00 40.75 31.75 99.22% 101.88% 30.00% 69.22%

Bangkok 40.00 35.34 26.07 72.41% 88.35% 70.00% 2.41%

Singapore 40.00 45.85 24.85 62.13% 114.63% 30.00% 32.13%

Bangkok 40.00 35.75 31.75 79.38% 89.38% 70.00% 9.38%

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Figure 3.20 Analysis of timesheets from New Zealand team

Content is another problem. To collect content for the knowledge inventory can be hard work. Transforming implicit knowledge into explicit information is an activity in which special skills and often creativity is needed. Some communication and information processes are very difficult to describe. It is linked to individual skills: delivered content may simply not be understood. Information must be derived by one group (MOL, ministry of learning) may need to be mapped or standardized to be meaningful to someone else in the organization. The data must support and truly answer questions being asked by the user, and requires the appropriate meta-data to be able to find and reference. Data relevancy means avoiding overloading users with unnecessary data.

LocationNo. of Required

Hours

No. of Logged

Hours

Total Billable

hours

Adjusted Billable

RateActual Utilisation

Targeted Billable

RateVariance

Auckland 38.00 38.00 21.00 55.26% 100.00% 30.00% 25.26%

Auckland 38.00 38.60 13.75 39.97% 101.58% 70.00% -30.03%

Auckland 24.00 37.00 4.00 16.67% 154.17% 30.00% -13.33%

Bangkok 40.00 35.75 35.30 88.25% 89.38% 70.00% 18.25%

Auckland 38.00 40.69 20.24 66.59% 107.08% 30.00% 36.59%

Auckland 30.40 40.75 21.75 71.55% 134.05% 70.00% 1.55%

Sydney 19.00 19.00 11.94 62.85% 100.00% 70.00% -7.15%

Bangkok 40.00 35.16 12.43 31.07% 87.90% 70.00% -38.93%

Auckland 30.40 40.35 16.75 73.46% 132.73% 70.00% 3.46%

Sydney 38.00 40.25 13.75 36.18% 105.92% 70.00% -33.82%

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Figure 3.21 Showing non-standardized and non-categorized courses

After spending time enrolled some courses, I noticed that some content is not good enough. Some are created from the creator experiences which might not be applied to all cases and they are presenting as a boring way. They converted a PowerPoint and import to the system. The content is not updatable. Found an example that to use front 14 pixel in the email body if it is in a Smartphone version. Everybody knows Smart phones now a day get bigger and bigger with higher resolution. 14PX might be the way too small in a few years.

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Figure 3.22 Showing a front size of transforming an email with no reason to support

Namely is another problem for HR. After have, a group discussion with Bangkok and Sydney Human Resources Department (T&TD). I have spotted one same problem that Namely is not powerful enough especially when people take leaves. People take leave time to time and the company are aware that and made a policy for some departments that if employees take leave more than 3 consecutive days. Their incentive bonus should be prorated as the company needs to make it fairs and equals for employees that take few leaves in a year. The problem with the Namely is it can only manage time off. HR needs to calculate prorate themselves and that is the point. Another example for Namely is when people relocating to other offices. As the amount of day offs are different based on each country. When I move to the other offices, my time off should be adjusted. For example, If I have worked for Bangkok for 1 month and then relocate to the Sydney office for the rest of the year. My time off should be 19 days (20-day offs for Australia regulation) instead of 10 days (Thailand regulation). Manual works by humans always not perfect. People always make mistake. Especially when it relates to something sensitive e.g. Salary, money, or day offs. It is not fun if your salary is not correct and it is also not good for the company if a HR make a mistake with paying more than what they should get.…................ …….. .

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CHAPTER 4 BUSINESS STRATEGIC PLANNING

Regarding the analysis from chapter 2 by using 3 models i.e. Porter’s Five

Forces, SWOT and PEST analysis. I found 3 major issues that the company needs to consider. The first issue is their employees, the second issue is their clients and the last issue is their information systems. 4.1 Analytic results from Porter’s Five Forces, SWOT and PEST analysis

After reviewed from those three perspectives and mapped them with the model I used in chapter 2. Here is the result from each model.

4.1.1 PEST Analysis 4. 1. 1. 1 Political - uncertainty and instability is an obvious risk. Asian

markets may offer considerable opportunities for expanding their businesses may also pose challenges. Before considering expansion into a new or unknown market, a risk assessment of the economic and political landscape is critical. If the company wants to penetrate their target to Asia. They need to monitor political developments and have a plan to mitigate political risks of doing business abroad especially if they need to invest more in Thailand and Singapore. They need to study AEC regulations thoroughly.

4.1.1.2 Economic - slow productivity growth is a worry. Asia has not been able to catch up to the high productivity levels of countries at the global technology frontier. Declines in trade and foreign direct investment could also be harmful to Asian economies given their vital roles in transmitting technology and promoting domestic competition.

4.1.1.3 Social and cultural - As big companies can afford diverse focus groups which means we must intelligently try to assess social factors to the best of their ability but some social Medias such as Facebook, Twitter are banned in China.

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The company needs to think about a different plan for operating in China as everyone knows that Social media is the most effective marketing platform. So the company might need to optimize their solution to fit with each country.

4.1.1.4 Technological - People realized that we can use any kinds of data to drive a marketing using technology but in some country they are not ready and not able to do that. Some Developed country e. g. Singapore and developing country e. g. Thailand might be able to do that but in some underdeveloped country e. g. Laos might needs more time to adopt the technology before the company can jump into the market.

In conclusion, each country have their own PEST factors. If the company needs to acquire more Asia clients. They should not say just Asia. They should have a clear point, specific to a country and dedicate efforts to the targeted country. They might need to set a local team to study and research throughout the market.

4.1.2 SWOT Analysis 4. 1. 2. 1 Strengths - The Company is developing a strategy to create

employee experience by rotating them between teams. Which takes into account the physical environment their employees work in, the tools and technologies that enable their productivity, and learning to achieve their best at work in many roles. This enables them to work on many areas in many industries. When a new client comes in, their employees are ready to express their expertise from using their experiences to implement their strong consumer-centric solution.

4. 1. 2. 2 Weaknesses - Their solution is quite complex and hard to present especially when getting in a new market and marketers not familiar with the solution. Trying to give an example to Asian clients might not help much. They cannot map the idea to something that does not exist in their country. The company needs to show their idea and solution to public more. To make the target market knows then and understand what they are doing. This is important when they want to play in a new market where nobody knows them at the first place.

4.1.2.3 Opportunities - Digital marketing is about understanding your customers. Customer preferences, features, and brand opportunities will continue to surprise us. In reality, customers in different country are interested in different thing.

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Some country may have more customers concerning on price some may have more customers concerning on quality.

4.1.2.4 Threats - Trending is so simple in this market. Every company trying to play with big data, but as big data scope is still up in the air. We still have no Enterprise level software, employees are not ready to adopt to use this yet.

In conclusion, Market local research is required. They need to publish it to make people aware that the company does exist in their country and to show their vision. It is also an opportunity do to something deeper. Customer insight has 2 sides. First, learning from data and the second from observation. They already have the first one but the other side, they might need to set up a team to do research customers in each country maybe from questioners, focus group, etc. In shorts, the company should have a new team that doing that same thing to companies like Nielsen Holdings or Ipsos. I discussed this with one person from the analytic team, she is not agree though. She said “Market research and database marketing are totally different. Most of the companies have their marketing team to do market researches. They know what to do, they know the action but they just do not know how to deliver it to customers that why they need the company to do the job.”

4.1.3 Porter’s Five Forces Analysis 4.1.3.1 Threat of New Entrants - Everyone knows that the data driven

marketing is becoming a must thing that they need to do. The market will become a red ocean in the very near future. There are only 2 options to survive in this situation which are become a giant of the market and be more unique that they can do what other companies cannot do.

4.1.3.2 Threat of Substitute Service - There are 2 different ways to do marketing. First is learning customer’ s behavior which also already have a strong solution for this. Second is learning from observing or doing research. The company does not have the second thing where the other companies e.g. Nielsen Holdings can do. Having both sides might improve their solution to be more accurate and reliable.

4.1.3.3 Bargaining Power of Buyer - Retaining customer relationship is the thing that the company needs to do anyway but there is a technique called switching costs. Switching costs are the costs that a client incurs as a result of changing

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the company to other companies. Although most prevalent switching costs are monetary in nature, there are also psychological, effort- and time-based switching costs. A switching cost can manifest itself in the form of significant time and effort necessary to change solutions, the risk of disrupting normal operations of a business during a transition period, high cancellation fees, and a failure to obtain similar replacement of services.

4.1.3.4 Bargaining Power of Supplier - They should not develop any software themselves as they are not a software company. They should focus on what they do best and finding new tools from other suppliers to improve their solution not to develop it by themselves.

4.1.3.5 Rivalry among existing competition - Their competitors in the market become more and more efficient. They can control costs and develop new products. In competitive markets, if firms do not improve their productivity they will lose customers to other firms and new entrants. Competition is a key driver of increased productivity by promoting efficiency, removing barriers to entry and exit, and encouraging innovation.

In conclusion, the company needs to do something different from other competitors e.g. building new researching team, finding new software to improve their productivity or to target new segments with a cheaper solution. The market is becoming a red ocean. Once that happened, it will be hard to change as the company might be too behind their competitors. 4.2 Porter's generic competitive strategies

One of the most well-known model which is Porter’s generic competitive strategies to guide of the company new strategies. Porter’s generic strategies describe how a company pursues competitive advantage across its chosen market scope. There are three generic strategies, either lower cost, differentiated, or focus. A company chooses to pursue one of two types of competitive advantage, either via lower costs than its competition or by differentiating itself along dimensions valued by customers to command a higher price. A company also chooses one of two types of scope, either

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focus (offering its products to selected segments of the market) or industry-wide, offering its product across many market segments. The generic strategy reflects the choices made regarding both the type of competitive advantage and the scope.

Porter described an industry as having multiple segments that can be targeted by a firm. The breadth of its targeting refers to the competitive scope of the business which the company cannot do that. They need to work in industrywide as their clients are from many industries.

Porter defined two types of competitive advantage: lower cost or differentiation relative to its rivals. Porter wrote “The two basic types of competitive advantage combined with the scope of activities for which a firm seeks to achieve them lead to three generic strategies for achieving above average performance in an industry: cost leadership, differentiation and focus. The focus strategy has two variants, cost focus and differentiation focus.”

They seem to be more focusing on differentiation the services in a way in order to compete successfully. A differentiation strategy is appropriate where the target customer segment is not price- sensitive, the market is competitive or saturated, customers have very specific needs which are possibly under-served, and the firm has unique resources and capabilities which enable it to satisfy these needs in ways that are difficult to copy which is what the company is being. They service their clients which different requirements on each client which cost more when comparing to a company that has one solution that for all clients with low rating optimization. Differentiation drives profitability when the added price of the product outweighs the added expense to acquire the product or service but is ineffective when its uniqueness is easily replicated by its competitors. That also shifted the company to the position of industry-wide that they made a flexible solution that can fits for all industries. The question is should they shift from industrywide to particular segments or not.

Focus strategies is not a separate strategy for big companies due to small market conditions. Big companies which chose applying differentiation strategies may also choose to apply in conjunction with focus strategies. On the other hand, this is definitely an appropriate strategy for small companies especially for those wanting to avoid competition with big one.

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In adopting a narrow focus, the company ideally focuses on a few target markets ( also called a segmentation strategy or niche strategy) . These should be distinct groups with specialized needs. The choice of offering low prices or differentiated products or services should depend on the needs of the selected segment and the resources and capabilities of the firm. It is hoped that by focusing your marketing efforts on one or two narrow market segments and tailoring your marketing mix to these specialized markets, they can better meet the needs of that target market. The firm typically looks to gain a competitive advantage through product innovation and/or brand marketing rather than efficiency. A focused strategy should target market segments that are less vulnerable to substitutes or where a competition is weakest to earn above-average return on investment. The company has 5 industry teams which are banking and financial services, Media and other, Telco, Retail and B2B. I do not think that should cover all their target customers. They might have more clients in other areas in the future and they have to be ready for that. Even though it is Industrywide, but their solution is targeting big companies. They do not have a product for small companies or a company that does not need the best solution and want to pay less.

Figure 4.1 Michael Porter's Three Generic Strategies showing company positioning

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4.3 Company Strategies

4.3.1 Strengthening the core business Their best customer experience initiative is designed to offer the

client’ s customers the best experience among all automakers. All sales, service and financial service activities are aligned with each other throughout the entire duration of the customer relationship. Developing a growth strategy is not a one- size- fits- all process. In fact, due to having many industries, making strategic decisions based on someone else’ s successes would be foolish. Their industry teams should learn their own client's business. The core business is the industry team that need to be improved.

4. 3. 1. 1 Draft Senior Team - Their top leaders need to actively be involved in developing industry team leaders and not just delegate the job to others, their executive team mentors have to talk to their mentees for one hour a month. Cultivating this talent pipeline keeps mentees attractive to potential acquirers and the mentors need to see what they tend to look at is the second layer of leadership.

4. 3. 1. 2 Cross- Train - Hold their intermediate executives ( AMs) accountable for resolving all complaints from customers and addressing comments in the employee suggestion box. AMs are working closest with the client, they should have less work at operation and should work more on relationship. I have mentioned about the company is lacking a person who can get in touch with the client to acquire what clients really need. They need someone to do some research about their clients and their industry. Each industry has its own AM so AM should be the person who know best in that industry e. g. NZ industry. They should not have the same strategy or work process to the other industry teams. AMs should know the vision and mission of the company or even of the country they are operating in.

Think about after they got more Asian clients, the difference between working with Westerners and Asians will go higher so they need someone to tell what is the differences e. g. channels to communicate, customer preferences or problems in each country. Their executive team need to ask AMs to untangle the problems on their own and come to them only if they are stuck. Not only is this an effective way to get them working cross- functionally, but it will also relieve pressure

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on the senior team. They will be shocked by how many teachable moments the process creates.

4.3.1.3 Increase Flexibility - As mentioned, the company gives a lot of opportunities to their employees all the time. When they moved to a new role or new team and do not know where they should start working at. The most important role for midlevel execs ( team leaders) in that team is coaching those people. To excel at that, they need to learn to vary their style depending on the person or team and the opportunity or challenge they face. Use Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s situational-leadership theory to teach them the ropes. Only when they know when to teach or lead or do neither will they get peak performance from frontline employees and be ready to move up from stage 1 (when they moved in) to stage 4.

Figure 4.2 Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s situational-leadership theory

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4.3.2 Only Focus on the core business There are some knowledge gaps in the company core team. They

may be strong on the technical side but what about financial strategy, administration, HR. They have to prepare to manage the day-to-day tasks, from recruiting new talent to book keeping to financial planning. The company needs to have a knowledge gap within the ecosystems of their organization, they need to fill it. But their team needs to focus on developing their products and services, creating partnerships, and earning revenue. Their internal resources should be focused on their core competencies, not on these side tasks. So the thing that they need is to professional consultants or groups. The best plan is to outsource whatever services they can so as to save on the highest business costs of all. While getting the support they need and the assurance that these functions are being taken care of by professionals. Specifically, you can outsource the following 3 functions:

4.3.2.1 Financial - Depending on what they need, a consulting financial team may be able to help with financial projections, cash forecasts, operating budgets, financial plans, pricing, reporting, debt management, equity and debt negotiations and liquidations. Overall, Professional financial team can help the company with business planning, providing the company business plan with essential rigor. The company business is creating a product or service; finance is not their business. The company needs to look for a professional CFO who has experience working.

4.3.2.2 Human Resources - They can attest to the fact that HR can be a total time suck. From recruiting to managing personnel issues, from compensation to benefits, from payroll to employee policies and procedures, human resources management can take over your entire schedule. And HR costs include much more than wages all HR functions, while non- revenue driving, and have an associated cost. Outsourcing their HR functions is definitely a cost as well, but when they calculate it out per employee ( and figure on the invaluable savings of staying in compliance) it becomes clear that this is a necessary business cost. When the company is in its early stages, it is essential to get support, but only as they need it. To outsource does not mean they just hand over a function and forget about it. They will still want to be apprised of all aspects; hiring the right consulting groups will insure that they stay

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informed. After considered the turnover rate, the number of people getting in and out is too high. This problem can solve by professional. They know how to handle the situation and when they need more people to expand the company size. They just ask their HR outsource company to get more people. They can do it better, faster and smarter because that is what they are doing every days.

They do not outsource to make a service disappear; they outsource to reduce their cost structure and keep their internal resources focused on their business. When they outsource necessary functions on an as-needed basis, they can concentrate their internal team efforts where they are most needed: growth. And the companies they hire will help them stay on track as the company grows to the next level.

4.3.2.3 Product development - In theory, a small – medium company like the company should focus only one thing. Their main business is not developing software. They need to continuously improve their customer centric solution not to develop new software or create a new product. Their strength is the customer centric solution. They have a lot of experts in that field. Developing new software in house might be a wrong approach. The company is not a software company. They are not expert in coding or creating software. The company should stop developing software in house. It is not wrong to have a new product but not to build it by their own. They should use their expertise to find a company that can develop a great software under their requirements.

Looking for new software is necessary. There are tons of marketing tools out there in the market. Having their exclusive products is not incorrect but as they are not an expert in creating software. They can outsource other companies to create a product for them. It might cost a lot but in return it should be worth as the percentage of failure should be low as the outsource company should be the expert of create software.

4.3.3 Developing a Knowledge Management Strategy KM is a multi-disciplinary approach to achieving strategic objectives

thought the best use of knowledge. The value of knowledge provides a source of a unique competitive advantage to an organization. The idea that organizations and

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individuals within the company would be more effective and efficient if they knew what they know. Knowledge has been thus recognized as a core competency of an organization which as a result can impact organizational structure, processes, service delivery. Developing a knowledge strategy for an organization should begin with revisiting the organization’ s vision and mission and the associated strategic and business plans. These should form the basis of a roadmap for the establishment of a knowledge management strategy. A systematic knowledge management strategy is implemented to support the organization’s long-term business strategy. The business strategy of the organization will also help to identify the performance gap between the current workflow and the optimal workflow required to achieve strategic objectives. As everyone knows that KM is not a new thing. We knew this for a long time and a lot of companies tried to make it happened but most of them failed. It is because they are using as an IT base. Says they built a new system and encourage people to use that in many ways e. g. rewards but it does not work. The company needs to think different and not do just using IT base strategies. They also need to consider HUMAN base strategies. There are 3 steps to develop a strategy.

4.3.3.1 Understand the flow of knowledge Knowledge Management incorporates the flow of information

from collection to codification to sharing, but before they jump into that process, they have to make sure that they understand how knowledge flows within the people and teams. Consider the following to get started: Determine the most critically important knowledge, Map out critical business activities and Identify - isolate blockages.

4.3.3.2 Understand that KM technology is only one component KM technology is one of the critical success factors, especially

as systems have become more sophisticated and prevalent. Yet time and again they find themselves reminding their clients that Knowledge Management and KM technology systems are not synonymous. Technology is a tool and enabling platform and nothing more, no matter how many bells and whistles, many of which go underutilized anyway. Knowledge Management as a process involves many other components that are much bigger and more important:

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People – First and foremost, Knowledge Management is about tapping into the insights of people for sharing, learning and leveraging with other people across the organization. Other Practices and Processes – The Knowledge Management process takes place in relation to other practices, processes and flows of work and information within the organization. Culture – How the organization does (or does not) embody, encourage and support active participation and sharing will determine whether or not the technology is leveraged and optimized, or remains largely idle and untapped.

4.3.3.3 Address the critical success factors Various components must come together to create a

complete, cohesive Knowledge Management system. Each of them must be present, fully functional and interconnected for success. If any are missing or lacking, even the most well-defined process or sophisticated technology will be ineffective. Common issues that get in the way of KM success: Goals and objectives that are poorly defined, poorly communicated and lacking in participation and input from all stakeholder groups. Failure to tie Knowledge Management initiatives to business goals and objectives is the biggest problem we see. Lack of metadata, poorly- designed user interfaces and other missing features that empower users to find what they need, quickly and easily, and enable managers to maintain the system over time. Lack of change management initiatives that would help develop, promote and sustain a knowledge-driven culture.

4.3.4 Improve teleconference system Employees have to work with their colleagues in other offices all the

time. The lack of face- to- face communication can cause misunderstandings within teams, and worse, can result in lost or nonexistent communication. When the new system is implemented, participants are more likely to stay alert and focused on what is being discussed. As a result, projects are completed faster, productivity increases, and participants feel more in synch with each other and the message they want to convey. The new systems need to be easy to use and manage. And it needs to deliver

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great experiences across every work environment, from immersive theater to conference room to work and home office to mobile video on a tablet or smartphone. Communication technologies should bring people together not keep them apart. The new system should go in fast without requiring forklift upgrades or costly gateways. They should minimize network consumption to be more scalable at a lower cost. The ability for users to launch videoconferences with no technical assistance eliminates time- consuming manual requests for conferencing services is important. The new system need to be intelligent infrastructure that removes the impediments to ubiquitous video by making simple- to-use, interoperable, secure video conferencing available to everyone across any network, protocol, application, or device of choice. Having a good system to discuss with get rid of the problems I mentioned earlier. When they are able to talk in a good system with a clearer video, crystal clear voice and less technical issues that annoying them. The company employees will more understand each other from different locations. If someone does not understand something, they can look at caller’s body language, face expression, etc.

4.3.5 Process improvement In the market, the company is a not big company. They are not huge

and does not need so many departments in the company. That means they have no one to ever consider about the process in details. Restructure, high level process is what the C level made the decision, but they have no one to think about the process in details and to improve it. Says the company has no process improvement team to tell them how to work better, faster and cheaper. Giving freedom to employees might be a good idea that they can do what they want to do but having someone to help them to improve the way they work is better. They need a person to look at the current work style, think about how to improve and think of a better way how to work better. By improving standardized regulation and processes, they need to aim to eliminate waste. They need to add value by reducing waste.

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CHAPTER 5 RECOMMENDED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

To align with the strategy plans from the previous chapter, this chapter is

bringing information systems to enable and support those plans. Having KM can strengthen the core business by providing knowledge information sharing. Juniors or new joiners can learn lessons on the system but they need to develop a strategy to make the KM good. Having just a good system is not enough. Encouraging people to use the system is the thing that the company need to do. People from management level can see what, when, who, why the operation level are doing jobs. They can analyze the information on KM and comes up with a process improvement strategy. Talking about the new product and new systems. To only focus on the core business, the company needs to get rid of the none- core business activities e. g. Financial and HR. By doing that they need to look for a system to replace the legacy systems. They need to find a system to enable the functions if they decided to outsource. Having a new product will increase their sale opportunities. Having just a new cheaper product will make a big impact. Their prospects will have more options. If they are concerning on price, the company can offer the new cheaper product while if a company have more concern on performance. The company just offer their existing product but having a variety of products is not the answer. Having more and more products will cost the company more and also it is much difficult to handle or manage resources. Table 5.1 Strategy plans and information systems mapping

Strategy Plans Information Systems

Strengthening the core business Knowledge Management Developing a Knowledge Management Strategy

Process improvement Only Focus on the core business New product and New systems

Improve teleconference system Teleconference system

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5.1 Knowledge Management

Creating and supporting a culture helps motivate employees to understand the benefits of KM at all levels of the organization and encourages knowledge sharing. People and the way they are managed are at the center of the knowledge-based working process. KM is not a new thing. Everybody knows that KM is important but a lot of them failed and the company is one of them. The company enabled KM with IT base style. They use IT to drive KM i. e. providing a space that employees can create content. When they realized nobody uses it. Strategies and policies are becoming more important in this situation. The company should not drive KM by using only IT base. They should also encourage people to use it. Rewarding is not the answer. Rewards and incentives which promote employee interaction will encourage knowledge sharing and creation. However, focus on individual performance and knowledge hoarding with limited employee interaction together with lack of top management involvement will inhibit knowledge sharing. Direct mechanisms aimed at establishing a culture of knowledge sharing and learning include: regular organizational seminars, across business unit brainstorming sessions, tutorials lead by organizational.

IT infrastructure should be developed to support the organizations information systems such as data storage and processing. IT plays a vital role in capturing and sharing explicit knowledge of an organization by providing shared common access to information such as; procedural manuals, client and organizational contact databases. IT infrastructure should aim to promote communication especially between parts of the organization that are physically separated from each other.

5.1.1 Objective 1. To encourage the company employees to use KM (Davinci) 2. To sustain company knowledge

5.1.2 System capabilities 5.1.2.1 Search function - They have to develop search tool properly,

it has the potential to bring knowledge that employees might not even have known their organization possesses, into the light. Their Davinci needs to have a search architecture that is comprehensive and predictive, as well as being easy to use. The

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search tool should draw on similar searches in order to enable employees to gather information they may not have known they had, but which may prove useful to them nevertheless.

5.1.2.2 Profile-led - All too often, we think of a profile space as ‘ours’, rather than a place other user can come to find out about our capabilities. Davinci profile page should offer information about curated experiences and result in applicable insights. It should also allow users to collaborate and get in touch, adding a ‘human’ context to this information. A profile that is comprehensively filled out will boost a user’s reputation at their organization; gamified features such as a dashboard, will also encourage users to complete their profiles and help users to take responsibility for their role in knowledge management.

5.1.2.3 Make Davinci easy to navigate - Davinci has got to be easy to use. A massive reason why knowledge management initiatives fail is because they simply are not user- friendly enough. Scrambled URLs or pages embedded in make it harder for people to note exactly where useful information is stored. Davinci is browser-based and offers straightforward URLs is far easier to organize, curate and share.

5.1.2.4 Implement a content creation framework - They nearly always find it difficult to work out whether knowledge is current and relevant or not. Make sure that all pages within Davinci are built around a framework that answers the ‘Who, What, When, Where, Why’ questions for all users. This information can be filled in as part of a ‘contribution form’ so that will be readily available to users.

5. 1. 2. 5 Invest in analytics - Analytics are the single most important thing the company should invest in for their knowledge management system. For a system that is so dependent on people contributing, having a dashboard based on analytics that will make Davinci easier-to-use and make content easier. When in place, analytics can act as a force multiplier, leveraging the information they have already got access to and making it easier to apply the insights this data can offer.

5.1.2.6 Make participation in knowledge management mainstream and incentive contributions - Company events could be very useful here in terms of triggering an overall cultural shift in attitudes towards knowledge management.

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Gamified elements can be built into Davinci to reward top contributors etc. but in the short term, offering prizes and making knowledge management part of your performance expectations will be necessary in order to shift people towards making contributions on a regular basis.

5. 1. 2. 7 Connectable with other systems - Centralizing is the most important thing for knowledge management system as employees expect that they can find everything from Davinci and rely on it. Davinci should connect to every system in the company to gather information or even integrate some functions from other systems into Davinci. When the company has a new system implemented, they need do make it integrated first to make sure that all information will stay still in Davinci. Gmail is the primary thing that the company needs to do first. Emailing is the main channel to communicate internally and externally. Most of the time, some important information is discussed over email and never get documented. Davici should have an ability to import those important emails to the system easily.

5.1.3 System Alignment and Sustainability Table 5.2 Knowledge management costing break down

Resources Amount Price Time

Hardware - Server: Window server : Database server - Network Equipment

1 1 1

N/A N/A N/A

Software - Window Server - Davinci

1 1

N/A N/A

Human - Knowledge management manager (40,000 baht/month) - Software developer (25,000 baht/moth)

1 1

480,000 Baht 300,000 Baht

1 Year 1 Year

Miscellaneous - Rewards, Intensives (5,000 baht/month) 1 60,000 Baht 1 Year

Total 840,000 Baht

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5.2 New product and New systems

They are a company that is driven by technology and software. It is very important for them to continuously look for great software and as mentioned in Chapter 4, company strategies, the company needs to only focus on core company business and less focus on non-core company business i.e. Finance, Human resources and Product developing. Lacking of those departments will significantly impact to the company. Instead of completely getting rid of them. The company can still have them but not to do all of them by their own. Outsourcing will help them to run the company without those departments but they need to build or find new systems to cooperate with outsourcing companies.

5.2.1 Objective

1. To get new products or solutions to increase sale 2. To get new systems that enable to operate none core business

5.2.2 System capabilities 5.2.2.1 Enable their vision to drive customer-centric transformation by

automating a frictionless synergy exclusively - The new software must be better than the existing software the company is using or can do the extract same thing but cost less. For example, less license fee, less human efforts to operate. If it is not about costing it should be more advance in function e. g. can analyst through the customer data deeper, run faster, more automated functions or reduce the chance of incidents. There are a million of marketing software available in the market. They just find a new one that most eligible for them and can replace the existing products flawlessly. Big data is coming, finding a product that can operate big data in the commercial scale smoothly is a must in the very near future. People is another concern they need to consider. Once they found a new product, they need to assess their people skill that can operate in the new product. Establishing a program, training and workshop for their employee is required and the top- level management needs to consider about the migrating plan and middle level management needs to think about the action plan to migrate, draw the timeline and also allocate resources.

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It is quite important if they can have an exclusive product. Using a software like Unica that every companies can contact IBM directly is a risk. The risk is if their client wants to do that in-house they can do that easily because IBM is a giant that can support them anyway.

The new product should be eligible for all countries so the team can share the standard process and same templates to reduce risks, efforts, and varieties. Using the same product should be an advantage but it should also be customizable. Says even all countries are using the same product but in details they should be different.

5.2.2.2 Less functions, lower performance in a lower price - Most of the companies in the market do not want to spend a lot of money on communication. 4P marketing consist of Price, Place, Product and Promotion. We cannot denial this theory. Most of the companies rank promotion the last just because they do not have a lot of money to spend just to communicate to their customers with very high efficiency. They just looking for a channel that make some awareness to customers and that is it. They believe that they should spend money on Product, Price and Place the most. Good example is Watsons, Watsons is the biggest personal care stores in Thailand. They do not concern about sending the right offers to customers. You can see an example in the Figure below. It is showing that Watsons is offering me a Lipstick. They should know my gender and i do not use lipstick. It is very easy to look into my profile and suggest eligible products. That showed some successful companies do not concern about communication. They just looking for a product that they can communicate to customer with lowest cost. This is a niche market where other small – medium size companies are looking for and the number is not small. Having a new software product that can do similar thing to their main product is what the company should do. Just like the other companies that they are having many products to cover all customer segments.

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Figure 5.1 Example of low performance communicating channel

5. 2. 2. 3 Remain the same functions after getting rid of none core business - The biggest thing when a company decided to outsource is losing of key talent and poor knowledge transfer. Outsourcing creates uncertainty for existing employees and contractors who provide services to the client organization. The uncertainty can cause this staff to look elsewhere for employment and leave either before or during the outsourcing implementation, causing a need to either backfill the resource or reduce the amount of work performed by the organization. In addition, some of the client staff is temporarily engaged for knowledge transfer to the service provider during the implementation. If the staff is not properly motivated or if the service provider does not do a good job with knowledge transfer, this can cause

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decreased efficiency in service delivery and possibly introduce operational risk. These two issues can be significant problems if not addressed. The company needs to provide a new system that can get rid those 2 issues which can link to the first plan. The existing systems need to work well with external resources to make sure a proper knowledge can transfer to the outsourcing companies. An example is recruitment, if the outsourcing company know the weakest part of employee’ s e. g some technical skills. They can notice that from Davinci and improve the recruitment process e. g. slightly changing of qualifications. This is to ensure that the company will still operate smoothly between the company and outsourcing companies.

5.2.3 System Alignment and Sustainability Table 5.3 Finding new systems costing break down

Resources Amount Price Time

Hardware - Server: Window server : Database server - Network Equipment

1 1 1

N/A N/A N/A

Software - New Marketing tool - Electronic Data Interchange

1 1

150,000 Baht 50,000 Baht 6 Months

Human - Operating team (25,000 baht/month) - Software developer (25,000 baht/moth) - Account Manager (30,000 baht/moth)

5 1 1

1,500,000 Baht 300,000 Baht 360,000 Baht

1 Year 1 Year 1 Year

Miscellaneous - Software training (first year) - Server Hardware and DBMS 1

10,000 Baht 100,000 Baht

1 Month 1 Year

Total 2,470,000 Baht

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5.3 Teleconference system

5.3.1 Objective 1. To improve communication quality 2. To increase productivity

5.3.2 System capabilities 5.3.2.1 (Really) improve communication - Video conferencing restores

many visual cues that are necessary in long- distance communication. Non- verbal communication e. g. body language constitutes about two- thirds of communication between people. For instance, eye contact enables us to understand the meaning of a message from a speaker that voice communication alone may not completely convey, thus creating essential social bonds and shared understandings. That means having a good video quality is important. Eye contact is not just to see the audience’s eyes, but the quality of the video need to be good enough to see their eyes clearly. And yes, not just video, voice is the first priority. Especially when considering that the company has employees with over 23 nationalities in the company. It is obvious that their accent must be different and difficult to understand so having a good teleconference system should improve distant communication.

5. 3. 2. 2 Increase productivity - Everyone has experienced the never-ending conference call. Video conferencing basically eliminates those problems, even in large group calls. Important meetings are often shorter and more effective. Video conferencing users report saving a minimum of two hours a week with the technology. The interactivity of group collaboration and document sharing greatly increases productivity. Speed is important here. If you have the best teleconference system in the world e.g. 4K video streaming with super stable network but the employees need 30 minutes to set up just a meeting is not a good idea. Eliminating awkward moments e. g. need to wait someone to figure out how to contact or having some technical issues before getting start might make some people frustrate with the technology and that will affect to the result of the meeting also.

Software is another component to increase productivity. Always finding a better teleconference software is the thing that they need to do. Technology

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growing fast. In the very near future, we might have a new standard for teleconference e.g. hologram.

5. 3. 2. 3 Conferencing quality - The road network has to be well managed and maintained and equipped with road signs and traffic lights. IT support monitors for traffic offences and ensures that traffic can cross the various borders safely without smuggling goods. If these elements are not properly arranged, their pleasure in making calls will be short- lived. In fact, we can conclude that buying a teleconference system is a waste of money if the road network is not up to standard.

In their video conference environment, they can see the user as their end-point. They can choose between different brands and classes. They can see the road network as their internal network where their system administrators take on the role of the Police and the firewall does the same job as Customs. They can also define different routes of differing quality in their network and they can ensure good maintenance and adequate capacity. As mentioned earlier, Outsourcing is what I’m suggesting here. Their strength is not managing this. There are so many networking companies are available to help e. g. Cisco, Huawei who are an expert and have an excellent system to provide.

5.3.2.4 Visual aids - Although audio conferencing can still save people time and prevent the expense of travel, video conferencing provides the benefit of visual aids. These viewable objects make it easier for individuals to stay focused on a meeting’ s purpose and overall objective. Slide shows, or whiteboards can be used with video conferencing to gain interest. Ineffective audio conference calls can create more meetings due to lack of complete understanding, which reduces productivity and increases frustration. Video- centric communications allow participants to make use of multiple senses, rather than strictly their ability to hear a conversation. This heightens concentration levels and allows participants to absorb more information.

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5.3.3 System Alignment and Sustainability Table 5.4 Teleconference system costing break down

Resources Amount Price Time Hardware - Server: Window server : Database server - Network Equipment - Server endpoints - All-in-one webcam - Speakers

1 1 1 5 20 20

N/A N/A N/A

30,000 Baht 40,000 Baht 40,000 Baht

1 Month 1 Month 1 Month

Resources Amount Price Time Software - Huawei all-in-one HD video conferencing suite

20 20,000 Baht 1 Month

Miscellaneous - Implementation 1 10,000 Baht 1 Month

Total 140,000 Baht

5.4 Budgeting

After considering system requirements for each system. The below is consideration on budgeting for each system as follow

Table 5.5 Summary of budgeting for the new information systems

System Budgeting Time

Knowledge Management 840,000 Baht N/A

New products New systems 2,470,000 Baht N/A Teleconference 140,000 Baht 1 Month

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5.5 Value evaluation

Evaluating value for each system is considering on two things which are Tangible Benefit and Intangible Benefit

Knowledge Management Table 5.6 Value evaluation of Knowledge Management System

Tangible Benefit Intangible Benefit Reduce number of employee approx. 600,000 Baht (2 employee x Average salary 25,000 Baht x 12 Months)

Clients can trust and have less concern on losing knowledge. They do not have to worry when they hear someone is leaving

Retain existing customers approx. 1,000,000 Baht

Easy to find relevant information and resources. The company can also learn from what have happed in the past to avoid making the same mistakes twice.

Providing methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples to streamlines work, improves quality and ensure compatibility across the organization

Total Benefit 1,600,000

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New products and new systems Table 5.7 Value evaluation of finding new systems

Tangible Benefit Intangible Benefit

Acquire new clients approx. 2,500,000 Baht

Increase sales opportunities

Reduce number of employee in none core business team approx. 3,000,000 Baht (10 employee x Average salary 25,000 Baht x 12 Months)

Better and faster performance of none core business operation.

Total Benefit 5,500,000

Teleconference System Table 5.8 Value evaluation of Teleconference System

Tangible Benefit Intangible Benefit

Reduce traveling budget approx. 400,000 Baht (20,000 Baht x 20 Airline Flights)

Enhances personal communication. When used well for learning, the interactivity will enhance the learning and the teaching experience.

Acquire new clients approx. 1,250,000 Baht

Increase resulting in more productive time. Communication is improved, and meetings are more efficient.

Teams being able to communicate easily at any time, important decisions can be made instantly.

Total Benefit 1,650,000

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5.6 System prioritization

3 criteria which are importance, requirement and complexity IS/IT Strategic Plan (Prof.Dr.Siriluck Rotchanakitumnuai, 2553) that can be broken down as follows Table 5.9 Systems prioritization

System

Criteria

Importance (10)

Requirement (10)

Complexity (10)

Total Score (30)

Knowledge Management

8 8 8 24

New Products and New Systems

10 9 9 28

Teleconference System 6 6 5 17

From the table above, it shows possibility and importance of each system

so can prioritize system developing and implementing as per below First priority: Finding new products and new systems Software is the most important in the company. They use Unica to generate money without it the company cannot survive. Having a new product to cover small-medium sized companies is important. It will increase sales opportunities to acquire new customers. Second priority: Knowledge Management Considering on the very high turnover rate the in past few years. The company needs to contain and centralize the knowledge. When someone leaves from the company, their knowledge must be recorded and documented. Moreover, not just software, the

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company also depends on people. Having a system to improve skills and learn from other is also important. Last priority: Teleconference System This is not a critical issue like the other two systems, but it is nice to have a good teleconference system to increase productivity and avoiding making mistakes. This can be implemented when the company grow up and have more people. By that time this system will be more important as they will need to have more communication when they are bigger.

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Kudos (2017). What is Kodus. Retrieved August 5, 2017 from http://kudosnow.com/

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BIOGRAPHY Name Mr.Jetpawit Wangpeerawong Date of Birth November 20, 1990 Educational Attainment

2013: Information Technology Assumption University

Work Position Consultant