AstraZeneca and IBM Outsourcing Contract Case Study and Information Management

This case study discusses the mistakes made by AstraZeneca and IBM in their outsourcing contract, the importance of information management, and technology adoption for information management. It also covers the reasons for outsourcing contracts to be of five years and the reasons for choosing a lawsuit instead of an arbiter. The article provides insights into sustainable performance in organizations.

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Index Terms— AstraZeneca, IBM, IT Outsourcing, Information
Management, Legal rights of Outsourcing, Shared Operation,
Business Information
I. PART A: CASE STUDY
1. MISTAKES OF ASTRAZENECA:
The case study states that AstraZeneca had rejected
over 1.4 billion USD of Outsourcing Contract from IBM.
AstraZeneca or commonly what is commonly known as AZ
had terminated the agreement for IBM that provided the
company with IT service operations and facilities for the data
centre by 2011 of April. The MSA or the Master Service
Agreement required that the Organization of IBM would
provide the organization of AZ with services that are shared
for a limited amount of time until the time of their Exit Period.
The mistake committed by the AZ in the business process is
their policy was not dynamic. The AZ could not predict the
possible changes during their contract with IBM. The
dependency on the information technology of the organization
made them unable to track the contract for the termination,
which was the most important part of the business process.
2. Mistakes of IBM:
The contract between IBM and AstraZeneca required
that IBM would provide operations and services to the
organization AstraZeneca through a limited period of time till
the contract lasted. The contract had defined that the services
should be ‘shared’ as the services would require being as
‘shared infrastructures’. However, the word ‘infrastructure’
was not clearly defined in the contract(Soomro, Shah &
Ahmed, 2016). The justification of the IBM was that the
infrastructure is only applied to the operational area, and it
was not applicable for the infrastructure to the shared data
center. Another mistake made by the IBM was the assumption
that the outsourcing of the contracts is hard to achieve .They
also had the knowledge of the profit accumulates by the
company they are providing services for the first two years of
the services. It can be said that the organization should be
aware of the details about the termination of the contract and
the remuneration of the services given to the AZ.
3. THE REASON BEHIND THE OUTSOURCING
CONTRACTS TO BE OF FIVE YEARS.
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Generally, in case of outsourcing contracts, the term
for the contracts lasts two to three years for outsourcing deals
for applications. However, the deals between IT operational
infrastructures tend to last a little bit longer than the usual.
They tend to extend from the traditional contract limit of two
to three years to five or more years in general. This is because
the data centre service providers delivers the services in much
better way. In accordance to that, while a service is being
scheduled for a longer period of time, it is extremely important
that these services be established with a benchmarking process
that makes sure that the cost rates at the time of signing the
contract be flexible enough to accommodate the changes in the
economical aspect with the passing of time till the contract
gets terminated. This also applies to the changes that are
constantly noticed in business processes to the changes that
are everlasting in the technical areas. Therefore, the
organization should change in such a way that will maintain
the sustainability with the working structure of the
organization.
4. The reason of mistakes made by the two major
corporation:
The two major companies, IBM and AstraZenece
has made this mistake due to the lack of knowledge about the
business in long run.. AstraZenece did not assume that the
change would be rapid and they could not fortify the IBM
contract. On the other hand, the IBMdid not pay detailed
attention to the contract details.IBM had not thought the fact
through that there would be such problems and AstraZeneca
were in literal hurry to close the deal in order to be clear from
any of the legalities of contracts being closed to the
organization of IBM. Therefore, all the mistakes were
committed out of sheer mistakes in adhering to details and
foreseeing the business processes.
5. The reason for 2007 SLA doomed:
The mistakes committed by the two major companies
indicates that the 2007 SLA has failed in a very bad way. Both
the companies has failed to pay attention to the contract
details. Making the process accordance with the time was the
mistake made by the AZ. The AZ did not realize that till the
time of contract with the IBM, the changes in the business
process will not incorporate with the rapid changes. The
mistake made by the IBM was that they had overlooked the
details about the contract.
6. The specialty about 2012 SLA:
The contracts and the pricing of the IT services are included in
this policy. In order to specify the collaborations there were 13
principals. Among those 13 principals , there was a policy
Case Study and IT Research
Name of the Student
Name of the University

which states the ‘ fix first, pay later policy’. According to this
policy in case if any IT issue arises , kit will be fixed n the
highest priority. This will enable the faster solutions. In case,
if the conflicts occur , both the AsterZeneca and the vendor
will solve and oversee the problem independently.
7. Reasons for choosing the lawsuit instead of arbiter:
The use of arbitrator is less expensive than indulging a
lawsuit in order to dissolve the conflicts. The arbitrator will
also be an inexpensive alternative while will take much less
time compared to the lawsuit. Arbitrator is less confrontational
than fighting the lawsuit.
II.PART B: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
INTRODUCTION
Information management is the process of evaluating the data
and resources acquiring from the various sources and use
those processed information to achieve the personal and
organizational benefits. The end of the process is the deletion
or abort of the information. In the reality, the concept of the
information management is unattainable (Carriker, 2016). The
general concept of the information management is not clear
enough to interpret. There are three reasons that can able to
answer the situation (Goldschlag et al.,2015). These are the
various interpretation of the definition of the management,
along with the definition of the information is also interpreted
in a different ways. The last reason is the changing role of the
leader in the organization. The article will make an approach
to understand the primary concepts and related terms of
information management (Soomro, Shah & Ahmed, 2016). In
order to understand the matter clearly, the brief introduction
about the information management has been discussed . The
possible digital disruption and the sustainable performance in
the organization with the help of the information management.
This will help to get a more clearer view about the impact of
information management in the organization.
INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
It is a complex task for the organizations to keep the track
with ever changing market. Nowadays, the consumers want
the customized service and their demands are changing.
Gaining the loyalty of the consumers is not easy. This makes
the organizations to work on attracting the new consumers
along with keeping the good terms with the existing customers
(Robinson et al.,2014). Some of the examples of the changing
environments for the organizations are change in laws and
regulations and amount of touch points. Organizations are
needed to evaluate the new plan before jumping to the
conclusion and taking up the initiatives to implement the new
plans. These choices are the part of organizational
management. The proper way of implementing an idea of
information management goes through several processes in an
organization. This could be done by identification of a
information, judgement of the information is based on the
analysis of the information through the combination of
different needs(Soomro, Shah & Ahmed, 2016). In order to
determine the significance of the next level information the
filtering of the information at initial stage is needed. Prioritize
the information in accordance with the business needs and
advising the information management to be flexible enough
but not active to loss of information from the business
management system.
In order to make the choices, it is necessary to consider all
the internal and external factors. This will help to understand
the actual needs for the organization. The main objective of
the information management is to make the strategy which
will help to achieve the greater advantage in the competitive
market.
In order to make the strategy different attributes of the
organization should be considered. The plans should cooperate
the objective of the company and will help to make the
enterprise information management EIM plan. The choices
made are captured in a plan, the enterprise information
management EIM plan. The EIM plan is based on various
matters of an organization and these bring effective changes in
the industry. These changes are essential, as the
implementation of a correct information management plan
leads to the organizational success in keeping up with the ever
changing structure of business, economics and technology and
moreover keeps pace with the competitors as well.
Information management is complex task and it needs care
and proper plan for the implementation. The main concern
during the implementation should be regarding the goodwill of
the organization. The plan should eliminate the chances of loss
of information.
EXTENDING BOUNDARIES FOR INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT
The problems regarding the information management in real
word situation is more complex. The implementation needs to
be in more sophisticated way. The implementation should not
require to gather a large chunk of data to compare and analysis
future prospect of the organizations and outcome of the
business. However, it is not mandatory that these information
will give fruitful result in the future. The smart business
intelligence tools can be used to make the difficult decision
making.
This is simple because these are very difficult to achieve
given their complexity and volumes of data. It is required that
the process should have and anti-disciplinary approach and the
process orientation to analyze the information by the
combination of the Business Information tools along with data
collation and collaboration given the external third party
owners of the data, and the integration of its architecture and
technology as well. The technologies and the engineering
sciences are all related to the integrated systems that would
help in handling the problem in a much more sophisticated
and extensive way (Laudon & Laudon, 2015). This is called
Collaborative Business Intelligence or the CBI.

Propagation of thee information can be achieved by the
business intelligence(Dumais et al.,2016). Putting together a
Business Intelligence program meant assimilating massive
amounts of enterprise data from disparate sources using an
ETL or Extract, Transform and Load tool, and generate reports
with a query having industrial strength and reporting tool.
The business intelligence helps to analysis the data on ad-
hoc basis and helps the business experts to get answers about
the critical business questions.
However, in the past years, a lot of things changed that put
paid to the ability of the power user to work with those
answers (Soomro, Shah & Ahmed, 2016). Some of these
changes are, the number of electronic consumer touch points
has increased and the ability to capture these touch points has
increased too. The business organizations and the consumers
can use and evaluate the information in a digital way through
the web interactions such as e-commerce, gadgets and social
networking.
DIGITAL STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE
PERFORMANCE
Information analytics is solely connected on information
management system. In a much restricted way analytics
systems look for management of information. When this is
applied to the data analytics, it is considered to be the first step
taken towards the CBI. The ways are restricted, however the
organizations have been successful in presenting predictive
data implementation in the analytics techniques based on the
information to see the outcomes of what happens next.
Popular examples of the use of predictive analytics include: in
the telecom industry to understand churn, attrition and fraud;
in banking and financial services to predict loan defaults and
risk management in general; in insurance and retail to
understand consumer behavior.
The use of this technique can be seen in the sports field. It is
applied to judge or predict the possible winners on the basis of
the previous information. It has been seen that during the
matches the score cards of the current match situation is
displayed (Soomro, Shah & Ahmed, 2016). On that display
the current match situation is described and the predictable
winners are analyzed on the basis of the past data. However,
the predication of the result does not mean that it must be
happen in the near future. It is just the reflection of the
analysis which can be derived from the past information.
The another use of this technology is used in the traffic
system, where is helps to reduce the traffic congestion and
helps to choose the best path. The data analytics is becoming
an important technique in predicting things in a realistic way.
It is a fair judgment that the organized and accessible data
cannot provide all the insights for the predictive data. The
most essential functions of a business process is the
communication between the employees and the stakeholders.
Knowledge and information is only passed on with accordance
to that. The main function by which these are integrated and a
sustainable feature is obtained is by the implementation of an
overall and wholesome communication process.
It can be said that the management of the information and
management of the knowledge are almost of the same
features.
TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION FOR INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT
The companies which are providing the services to the users
should consider the knowledge as an important asset The
information regarding the business process is created, used ,
reused and at the end terminated (Rahman et al.,2018). In this
way, the introduction of the information management
happened and helps to transfer the disruption within the
organization..
The healthcare sector can be considered as an example
where information changes and cannot be controlled in a
structural way(Soomro, Shah & Ahmed, 2016). However, it is
also necessary that the information be propagated in the entire
industry in order to attain the fact of establishing a sustainable
feature of the communication technology in the business. It
can be said that the implementation of a new ICT technique
would be valuable in this regard for handling the problems
face by the industry in Information Management (Massaro,
Dumay & Garlatti,2015). This can be done by the
implementation of the Electronic Health Record, which is
commonly known as HER. This helps to track the recent
technical advancement and records the data regarding the
patient (Galliers & Leidner,2014). The device follows
healthcare system standards and it is so made because it would
be easier to propagate the information across all other
healthcare organizations as well. EHR systems has the
capability to keep accurate data and records the condition of
the patient within no time. It helps in retrieving a patient's
previous paper medical records without the need to find and
take out old medical reports. It also ensures the factor that the
data is accurate and legible.EMR can be considered a the most
effective way for recording and extracting the medical data
and tracks the long term changes for the patient results from
the digital disruption.
This can be said that the new technology will help to
implement the latest technology and will help in maintaining
the better information management within the organization.
CONCLUSION
It can be concluded from this discussion that the
management of the information is the concerned asset of the
organization. The process of the information needs to be done
in a proper way. The process of information includes the use,
reuse and termination of the data. Various ways point towards
the single goal of adapting to the latest technological
structures since the world of business is becoming more

intertwined to the technological advancements. While making
a strategy, it should be kept in mind that the process cannot be
successfully implemented which cannot go with changes with
the time. In case, if this happens , it will bring the organization
by providing the negative effects. The company will lack in
the competition and business organization will face a lot of
problems. However, feasible management of the Information
is only possible through effective communication throughout
and organization, it has also to be kept in mind that the
information propagation is absolutely free of data loss and
feasible for further implementation with careful handling of
information. The article will make an approach to understand
the primary concepts and related terms of information
management (Soomro, Shah & Ahmed, 2016). In order to
understand the matter clearly, the brief introduction about the
information management has been discussed . The possible
digital disruption and the sustainable performance in the
organization with the help of the information management.
This will help to get a more clearer view about the impact of
information management in the organization. It can be said
from the above discussion is that the management of
information is a critical issue. The management of the
information needs to be done in a proper way. It helps to
introduce some business intelligence tools which will help the
organizations to manage the business and the information
within the organization. The process of the management of
information helps to modify and improvise the business
strategies and implementations.
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