Telstra: Analysis of ITSM Adoption in Australian Government Agencies

Telstra commissioned Forrester Consulting to understand how Australian government agencies are adopting ITSM processes. ITSM benefits IT organizations to be more adaptive, cost-efficient, service-oriented, and effective. Telstra faces issues like network quality and customer dissatisfaction. Recommendations include hiring good decision-makers and IT experts.

Running head: TELSTRA
TELSTRA
Name of the student
Name of University
Author note

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Executive Summary
The service life cycle starts with understanding customer as well as user demand. On
this, a service portfolio is designed. The services are transitioned into operations where
maintained as well as managed. Continuous improvement in the system keeps the portfolio
updated. ITSM has become the complexity of organizations as well as growing maturity of IT
management. The benefits of this are to aid IT organizations to be more adaptive, cost
efficient, service-oriented, effective and more adaptive. In order to get a better picture Telstra
has commissioned Forrester Consulting to help understand how the Australian government
agencies are adopting key ITSM processes and the issues that organizations are facing in
delivering high quality information and communications technology in order to support
business services.

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary...................................................................................................................0
Assumptions...............................................................................................................................3
More governance, support and services are required.............................................................3
The service value chain is a priority for the government agencies........................................3
ITSM has been introduced in Australia.................................................................................4
Role of IT is changing............................................................................................................4
Introduction................................................................................................................................5
Analysis of the situation using the Doing Ethics Technique (DET)..........................................5
Analysis of the situation.............................................................................................................5
Analyzing the benefits of ITSM.............................................................................................5
Quality of the services provided by the organization.............................................................6
Security assurance..................................................................................................................6
As-a-service would become the norm....................................................................................7
In order To Be Successful, the Organization Needs ITSM....................................................7
ITSM Requires a Methodology..............................................................................................8
• Assess the current processes............................................................................................8
• Determine what ITSM processes.....................................................................................9
• To develop a work plan...................................................................................................9
• Implement a continual service improvement function..................................................10
Success Factors....................................................................................................................11

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People planning............................................................................................................11
Process planning...........................................................................................................11
Technology planning........................................................................................................12
Conclusion................................................................................................................................12
Recommendations....................................................................................................................12
Integration............................................................................................................................13
Sell the cost and quality impacts to the senior IT execs......................................................13
Targeting the future..............................................................................................................13
Managing new services........................................................................................................14
A top down approach as well as enough funding is necessary...........................................14

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Assumptions
Forrester’s study provided various results. These results are as follows:-
More governance, support and services are required
Previously IT clients required skills for planning, building, designing as well as
running it (Bradlow and Jayachandra, 2015). Until now, these skills are important but the
organizations need more set of skills in order to manage, integrate and source. This need is
very important within IT organizations.
The service value chain is a priority for the government agencies
Service management ensures the right service to the right people. This is applicable
beyond IT services in the form of a general rule. Service would come into being, services
would continually change, rise over time and they would grow. Service portfolio
management has been proved the best practice in order to ensure the perfect mixture of
services for a definite organization (Jaldén and Medbo, 2016). Australian government
organizations under IT have realised that 42% of respondents have managed their service
portfolio to be their first and the second highest priority.
ITSM has been introduced in Australia
Australian government institutions are introducing ITSM and showing some great
knowledge as well as familiarity with the same. Today 37% of state, 74% of federal and 17%
of local government IT organizations have accepted ITSM. Adoption of ITSM varies with
agency size, type and implementation approach
Implementation of best practices frameworks like ITSM depends on the budget of the
organization, support provided to the organization and the knowledge that the employees of
the organization have. State and local agencies have not been able to introduce ITSM until

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now. Federal agencies are twice as familiar to ITSM compared to local agencies (Will, 2017).
This is because of the amount of training provided to the smaller agencies. The
implementation approach is different in different organizations. Local agencies tend to adopt
ITSM with the help of a dedicated team. Compared to local agencies only 11% of the ITSM
is done by dedicated or focused team in federal agencies.
Role of IT is changing
Most of the IT organizations have placed themselves into a position where there s a
no win situation. This is because they have balanced challenges in their business as well as
demands along with apex expenditures. They have the ability to support, maintain the IT
systems and services and deliver those (Orange, 2015). IT organizations should think
differently in order to move ahead in this era. IT will need to accept new technology
management practices based on strategy of leverage. ITSM is one of the examples of
management practice that are adopted by IT organizations of Australian government.
Introduction
Telstra is also known as Telstra Corporation Limited. It is Australia’s biggest
telecommunications company. It builds as well as operates telecommunications markets
voice, internet, pay television, internet access, mobile and many more products as well as
services (McDougal, 2017). Telstra has been the largest producer of telecommunication
services. Inspite of being the best provider of services Telstra faced so many issues that have
affected the revenue of the company largely. The analysis of the issues and recommendations
to avoid them have been mentioned in the below paragraphs.

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Analysis of the situation using the Doing Ethics Technique (DET)
Q1. What is going on?
Telstra has been facing various problems. These problems include
Not focusing on the customer:
The customer and service centricity has been evident in the IT operations team; it has
not permeated its way in the rest of the IT organization. This is still not taking an IT
component point of view of IT delivery (Pallegedara and Warren, 2016). In many factors IT
service delivery is just as strong as the weakest link as well the failure to sell the concepts of
ITIL in the parts of the IT organizations allows such week links to continue and the potential
for IT service delivery to be at its best sub optional.
Lack in momentum
When ITSM tool vendor’s professional services team as well as external ITSM
consultants is on site driving implementation, IITL based activity and change is very high.
After the teams, leave IITL adoption loses momentum and the IT organization to fail to
progress further with its journey to increase ITSM maturity (Freeland-Small, 2015). This is
caused due to the firefighting nature of the IT organizations. At this moment, there is no time
or resource for improvement. As a result, IT organizations are never able to achieve their
objectives fully. They do not improve their level of ITSM maturity nor do they improve their
IT support and IT services delivery to the organization.
Q2. What are the facts?
Various facts regarding the problems faced by the IT executives of Telstra are-
A survey that has been carried out on Telstra across some countries like Hong Kong, India
and Singapore and Australia yielded that among all the organizations 59% of them have

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detected minimum one security breach that has been interrupting their business. This breach
takes place every month. This calculates to be more than double of the breaches that took
place in 2015. Many government organizations have decided that the breaches that are taking
place would be reported to the customers. This proves that cyber security is not an IT
problem; it has become a business problem. Many companies are providing data security
services around 2017 (Fitzgerald and Dwyer, 2017). The main key regarding cyber security is
that the businesses get a control on their data value, where is it situated, which has access of
the data and how properly is it protected. In order to keep data safe the It security experts
suggested starting from the top level.
Many organizations have provided the freedom to work from home. Their working
site is accessible from any device any time. They have already offered cloud services that
would be secured which would allow access to any data without any effort. Telstra has
introduced a solution for this, which can complete the puzzle. This solution includes mobile
telephony and fixed-line into one. This allows the workers to transit between devices during
an ongoing business call. This is done from desk phone to mobile and then to laptop then
tablet and again in the back process if required. In order to use the same number in all devices
so that the clients are able to have an immediate impression on the physical presence of the
business. With just a single tap, workers would be able to transfer the ongoing call to an
employee. They can also switch their phones from work number in to their personal number.
Q3. What are the issues?
Telstra faces various issues. Network issue is on of the major issues faced by Telstra.
This issue was previously a problem for just customers, but gradully it has become a major
problem for the company (Nacht, 2016). At first Telstra pushed back or ignored this mishap
series by saying just a bad luck. In this particular issue, frequency of the network is the root
of the issue.

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Customers claim to pay a huge amount of money while they take premium services of
the company. This was because of the superior quality of network quality provided by
Telstra. Telstra used to provide better quality services compared to its competitors (Thomas,
Burmeister and Low, 2017). The recent problem faced by the company has embarrassed it
largely. The main problem that the company faces is that it needs to retain the prices of
premium services. This would help them to maintain the trust of the loyal customers. This
would help the company to keep the loyal customers but it would fail to gain new
subscribers.
Q4. Who is affected?
The problems faced by Telstra affects the customer in first instance. It causes huge
damage to the company’s business. The network quality that has been deteriorated results in
customers to unsubscribe from the company’s premium services (Thomas, Low and
Burmeister, 2018). This yields the company to lose its loyal and regular customers.
Customers are u happy with the services provided by the company. Besides losing new
subscribers, the company is also losing its regular customers. The issues have affected the
business a lot. Their revenue has decreased largely.
Q5. What are the ethical issues and their implications?
The ethical problems faced by Telstra include the avoidance of the issue faced by the
company. When Telstra faced the network problem for the first time, the company ignored it
and considered it would get normal in some time (Thomas, Burmeister and Low, 2017). This
made the company lose its customers largely. The customers waited for the company to
resolve the issues. They thought it would get resolved very soon. In addition, they did not
abandon to the premium services of the company. After a definite time when the company

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kept ignoring the problems faced by its customers, people unsubscribed to its services
(Wilton, 2017). when the company took the issue seriously, many customers have already
unsubscribed.
Q6. What could have been done about it?
The company could take the issue seriously and resolve it when it got a hint regarding
the same. Ignoring it was the worst decision that it took. The company could have hired IT
experts and resolved the issue as soon as possible. The company could also hire good
decision makers who could take better decisions in such situations (Daly, 2015). The decision
takers are an important part of every company. They take decisions during any situation.
They play an important role when a critical situation arises.
Q7. What are the options?
The options that the company had are hiring a good decision maker who would take
decisions intellectually during tough situations. The company could hire good IT experts who
would detect the issue properly and resolve them as soon as possible (Turban, Whiteside and
Outland, 2017). This would help the company in many ways. It would not have lost its honest
customers. They should not have ignored it whenever they have to know about the issues
facing by the problem. They should have had better backup services that could balance the
damage caused by the issues already faced by the company.
Q8. Which option is the best and why?
The best option for the company was to take required action on the issues faced by the
company. The company should not have ignored the problem. This option is the best because
it should not have lost its customers (O'Connor, 2014). The loyal customers who had
subscribed to Telstra’s premium services would not have stopped using them.

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Analysis of the situation
Analyzing the benefits of ITSM
The new role of IT is to improve the sustainability and increase its scalability on
government platforms. For this purpose, a new management platform is necessary. It is a
logical living framework in order to manage IT services, these services are suppose to work
in various circumstances. ITSM describes the effectiveness and efficiency of the service life
cycle and gives a framework for governance for managing the services (Wijesinghe,
Scheepers and Mcloughlin, 2016). By connecting the different needs in the plan that has been
build, and operate teams, IT organizations are claiming improved efficiency, quality as well
as cost.
Quality of the services provided by the organization
Sloppy change management, for example, can cause business downtime that prevents
customers from leveraging the organization online services (Campbell, 2017). This causes a
decrease in satisfaction and reduces the productivity of the organization workforce. Reducing
problem resolution time that in turn improves uptime and customer experience is just one
example that indirectly improves the quality of a service.
Assurance of proper security
Securing an extended government organization will require strategies that encompass
both architecture and infrastructure. Traditionally, enterprise security tasks focus on securing
organization endpoints, data centers, and extranet infrastructure and applications — in other
words, we typically focus on protecting assets that the organization manages or over which it
has direct control.

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In order To Be Successful, the Organization Needs ITSM
Thirty-six percent of the respondents ranked “making ITSM a priority” as their first
choice of barriers to adoption. This indicates that ITSM is seen as a competing priority with
other priorities that IT government organizations might have. At the same time, government
agencies claim that supporting services is a high priority — 47% indicated that operating,
optimizing, and supporting services is their highest priority. ITSM does have its roots in the
IT operations space. However, recent iterations such as ITIL v3 and ITIL 2011 have adopted
a much more holistic perspective of managing the service from its initiation and onto
operation. The biggest issue is that to implement ITSM, IT organizations need to understand
what their challenges are and what to improve. This is where the development of a strategy
and road map comes into play. An ITSM strategy needs to be developed in alignment with
the strategy of the government agency to support its goals and plans of growth, customer
alignment, or other demands and agendas (Melendez, Dávila and Pessoa, 2016).
ITSM Requires a Methodology
IT infrastructure and operation professionals work in a domain that is full of
uncertainty and complexity, making improvements difficult. However, organizations that had
had better understand their goals; process maturity, culture, behavior, skills, and capabilities
cannot only work to improve that capability but also gain the ability to make more-effective
investment decisions. ITSM provides a framework that encourages a broad holistic approach
to service management that considers internal and external groups. Infrastructure and
operation professionals should look to ITSM to rethink the delivery and support of services
within their organization (Rahman, 2015). Adopting and continuously driving ITSM requires
a methodology; Forrester recommends that IT leaders apply the following points:
Understand the requirements of end users

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The goal of ITSM is to align IT services with business objectives and customers’
needs. To achieve this goal, IT must understand the requirements from the end users
(Forsgren and Humble, 2015). The creation of a service strategy that defines the portfolio of
services to be offered and the end user to be supported is the first step in an ITSM journey.
Invest in technology to be used
Once the organization has prioritized the ITSM processes to mature, the organization
next step should be to review the organization existing ITSM tools and how they are being
used. To get started, assess the organization tools portfolio based on the organization ITSM
processes. Develop an inventory of current IT management tools to identify gaps and
opportunities for tool rationalization based on where the organization is sufficient or deficient
on ITSM process.
Success Factors
Almost any process or improvement around a system requires the understanding,
definition, and achievement of benefits. Additionally, influencing factors that facilitate or
impede its success need to be considered. Critical success factors are the few key areas that
must go right for something to take effect.5 ITSM involves the strategy, design, transition,
operation, and continual improvement of services. Adopting the ITIL framework and
implementing ITSM is not the end goal; it is a means to achieving improvements to
Productivity, quality, business reputation, and low costs (Morana, Schacht and Gerards,
2015). To deliver these benefits, ITSM adoption with the far too common “build it and they
will come” approach will not work. Because adopting ITIL requires considerable time,
resource, and organizational change management, Forrester finds that one of the most critical
success factors for ITIL is planning. Planning should be inserted across three key areas:

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Planning people management
Understanding and determining the right people on the project team is most important
to ITSM programs and projects. Additionally ensuring that planning, communication,
awareness, and education activities are a focus area to encourage employee inclusion and
prevent as well as manage resistance.
Process planning.
Many organizations are not able to see the current state of their ITSM and ITIL
processes. Before undergoing any sort of process improvement program, IT organizations
must determine their current state and which processes is most important going forward to
deliver key business priorities or solve key business plans (Jäntti and Hotti, 2016). Successful
ITSM implementations have prioritized the processes and then conducted a maturity
assessment to close gaps between where the organization stands and where it wants to be.
Technology planning.
Getting the right ITSM technology is not as big a key contributor to success as many
might think. Too many IT organizations, unhappy with their current ITSM technology, jump
feet first into replacement mode. This is the equivalent of applying a new coat of paint to a
house that is falling down; people will still not want to live there.
Conclusion
From the above paragraphs, it can be concluded that despite being the best
telecommunication service provider Telstra has faced many issues and it has been affected
due to this. It has lost many of its loyal customers. The ignorance and casual attitude towards
the problems faced by the customers, Telstra had to lose many of its loyal customers. Some
recommendations to overcome the issues have been mentioned below.

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Recommendations
Recommendations that can be applied are as follows:-
Budgets are available at both the type of organizations, federal as well as state.
Complexity in IT sectors increase day by day are scarcity of well-qualified technical skills is
faced. Usage of ITSM provides two results. These results include increasing the effectiveness
as well as the efficiency of IT operations and increasing the quality of operations. This also
adds up the further savings. The savings is done by reducing the amount of resources that is
being used for fixing problems. The surveys performed by Forrester’s on IT government
executives that have implemented IISM, resulted in cellar recommendations for actions by
the ones seeking quality as well as efficiency. The following recommendations can be
applied.
Integration
ITSM allows organizations to manage as well as integrate processes at various levels.
For its full affect, they need to tie up into higher level ITSM strategy. For example if the
organization is introducing self-service activities, these activities need to be described in a
service catalog. This catalog is a part of service portfolio. This service catalog would include
a variety of service items. Some of them may be directly delivered by the government IT
organizations and some of them might be by an outsourcer or partner. These services should
have SLAs that would describe the cost as well as the quality of the service provided by the
organization.
Sell the cost and quality impacts to the senior IT execs
IT leadership is driving ITSM, so focus on it. Present the labor savings and quality
improvements to get started. Then, based on early successes, add strategic justifications for

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continued service management — like better alignment with the business and a strong
integration into service providers.
Targeting the future
It is difficult to arrive at a place without intending to reach it. Therefore, while cost
reduction and quality are the best places to start — and an incremental approach is most
likely to succeed — the organization should figure out the long-term opportunities for ITSM
at the organization’s agency. Consider addressing the entire services life cycle — including
all of the organization sourcing partners, building a business-value proposition for these
services, and improving IT-business alignment as a result. Then regularly review the
organization short-term progress in terms of achieving both the cost-benefit targets that drive
the initial funding as well as the ongoing ability to achieve big-picture results.
Managing new services
The gap between business priorities and IT delivery capabilities will be filled by a
variety of technology services providers, from traditional IT services outsourcing incumbents
to upstarts with cloud- and software-as-a-service-based business models.
A top down approach as well as enough funding is necessary
To achieve benefits with ITSM governance and best practices, three critical success
factors are important: Budget needs to be available. ITSM is an investment in people,
process, and technology. The return on investment of ITSM is achieved through the
investment in best practices that are able to streamline and automate processes to design,
deliver, and maintain IT services to the respective organizations. Make ITSM a priority with
goals and strategy. Top-down support is needed.

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