Win Wide Area Network from Competitor

Understanding Business

MBA was selected by Telecom to lead this project based on its understanding of the business of the Inland Revenue Department (IRD). MBA had been part of the IT strategy development team at IRD and specifically had led the development of the electronic commerce strategy. The electronic commerce strategy had been based on identified business drivers such as delivering consistent high-quality information and lowering the costs of compliance with business tax regulations.

Identifying Opportunities

IRD wanted to upgrade its data network that linked its twenty-eight offices while rationalising the number of terminal servers on its core systems network. However, rather than going head to head with its competitors, MBA suggested to Telecom that it seek for an approach “outside the square”. IRD had substantial voice, interactive voice response (IVR) and fax traffic as well as data. Given the plans to establish a significant intranet, additional bandwidth would be required to carry the total traffic load.

Redefining Processes

Focusing on the electronic commerce aspects of the solution MBA suggested to Telecom that in addition to attending to basic network design we should also determine the different ways in which customers communicate with or obtain information from IRD. MBA judged that if New Zealand followed the USA in Internet usage the network would need to expand substantially to accommodate future usage.

Creating Value

IRD’s business drivers were reducing the costs of taxpayer regulatory compliance and offering consistent, high quality advice and information to all taxpayers. Telecom agreed with MBA’s strategy of incorporating a series of proposals creating value through a series of solutions incorporating a set of applications to improve and automate business processes within IRD and with IRD’s business customers.

Supporting Objectives

The multi-faceted solution presented by Telecom to the IRD clearly supported the business objectives documented in the IT strategy of the IRD.

Improving Performance

The network design, business applications and internal business process improvement applications proposed by Telecom to the IRD showed clearly how business performance would be improved.