Course Project: Telecommunication's Impact on Business

Objectives

The objective of this project is to allow you to select an area of telecommunications and evaluate its impact on a particular business. The purpose is to evaluate how a company uses telecommunications to improve its strategic or competitive advantage in its industry, and/or how the company's innovative use of telecommunications solves a real-world business problem.

You can select a topic and company with which you are familiar or you may research a company. Select your topic from one of these three basic areas:

• E-commerce - Write a paper on how a particular company uses e-commerce in developing a strategic advantage to improve its efficiency or market share and create increased profits.
• Mobile Application - Write a paper on how a particular company uses a mobile application in developing a strategic advantage to improve its efficiency or market share and create increased profits.
• VoIP Transition - Write a paper on the reasons a company would migrate from a public switched telephone network (PSTN) to a VoIP network using the Internet and how this would develop a strategic advantage to improve its efficiency or market share and create increased profits.

Course Project Outline

An outline of what should be included in the Course Project is listed below.

• Overview and current status of the company. This should include the following: Short (not more than 1 page) introduction to the paper, the major players in the company's industry, and a brief historical review of the company.
• What are the characteristics of the company? What are the company's goals, objectives, and mission? What is its organizational structure and context: Is it centralized or decentralized? What is its size (number of employees, sales volume), age, technological sophistication, business processes, automation, and leadership?
• What strategies are currently employed by the company? What are its products and services? Who are the beneficiaries of the company products and services?
• Discuss the company's external opportunities (trends, vacant niches, demographics, etc.). What does the industry look like? What are the economic data (population/demographics, cost of living, GDP, etc.) that impact the organization?
• Perform an analysis of the company's telecommunications (includes both voice and data) function, including goals and objectives of the telecommunications function, alignment of telecommunications goals with the business goals, and the criticality of telecommunications to the organization. Is telecommunications central to the organization's business? Is it primarily a supporting function? Is the telecommunications function used for problem solving, problem recognition or to open up new opportunities? What telecommunications equipment is employed? What vendors or sources are used and what services are used? What telecommunications problems does the company encounter? Does the company use telecommunications to its advantage or are they understaffed regarding a telecommunications manager and staff to support the technology? Are any telecommunications functions outsourced? Is there any business process design initiatives? Are there any telecommunications projects being planned or implemented? Is there a systemic approach to telecommunications projects?
• Recommendations: Propose suggestions to management describing a project that uses telecommunications technology in an innovative way for competitive or strategic advantage. (What suggestions might you offer? Why might these suggestions be helpful? What would you recommend that the organization continue? What should they change? Would you make any changes to the mission, objectives, goals (or other inputs), the culture, structure, leadership; especially information systems/technology, etc.?)
• Summary and Conclusions: Provide a closing to your paper that ties back to the introduction and the goals and objectives of the company in using telecommunications to obtain a strategic advantage, increase market share, and improve profits.

Milestones

Week 1: Choose your topic and company for the course project in the Week 1 Course Project Topic Discussion forum. (15 pts)

Week 2: Provide a 1-2 page paper that identifies your selected topic in some detail and presents a plan for conducting research to complete the project. (45 points)

Week 6: Your Research Paper should be approximately 12 - 14 pages, not including title page, table of contents, references, appendix or exhibits. It is due by the end of Week 6. Submit your assignment to the Week 6 Course Project Dropbox located on the silver tab at the top of this page. (230 points)