Critical Analysis: Vodafone CIO's Strategy on Legacy Network & Tech

This report provides a critical analysis of Vodafone's IT strategy based on an interview with its CTO, Jorge Fernandes. The analysis covers themes such as cutting-edge technology, the shift towards a digital world, and Vodafone's approach to innovation and customer service. It also identifies missing issues, particularly the lack of emphasis on security within the telecommunication systems. The report further explores Vodafone's future direction, including its plans for 5G technology and its efforts to meet increasing customer demands. The analysis highlights the importance of balancing legacy systems with new technologies while addressing critical security concerns in an evolving digital landscape. Desklib offers a variety of solved assignments and study resources for students.

Running head: LEGACY NETWORK AND CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY
Legacy Network and Cutting-edge Technology
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s note

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Table of Contents
1. Introduction to IT at the Company..............................................................................................2
2. Theme Sections............................................................................................................................3
2.1 Cutting-edge Technology......................................................................................................3
2.2 Change towards a Digital World...........................................................................................3
3. Missing Issues..............................................................................................................................4
4. Future Direction...........................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................7

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1. Introduction to IT at the Company
Vodafone Group is considered as the multinational companies in British. The
headquarters of the company is situated in Newbury and London. The company primarily
operates in Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The division of Vodafone Global Enterprise
primarily helps in providing the IT and telecommunication services to different clients situated in
various countries. The Vodafone Group supports the basic infrastructure and latest IT
technologies within several large parts of the UK economy (Anton-Haro and Dohler 2014). They
consider that any kind of failure would prove to be a major impact on the customers and their
economy. The company had adopted the TCP/IP at the heart of the telecommunication network.
The transformation of the technology has gained momentum in the past decade. Besides
providing broadband and domestic mobile services, the company also holds the major
responsibility of designing, building, deploying and management of large-scale infrastructural
projects. These are primarily deployed for the biggest UK enterprises based on public sector,
energy and financial services. As per the current reports of the company, the growth of data
within UK have been doubled every year. This would put extreme pressure on the underlying
infrastructure of networks. This growth in the IT infrastructure and improvement in the
telecommunication sector has been possible with the prospect of providing high quality of
services to the customers (ComputerWeekly.com 2019). The Vodafone Group is dedicated
towards providing good quality of service to their customers to every part of the world. This
would include the services of data and voice to their customers. The inclusion of the high level of
services to the customers would require a major kind of continuous investment and impacts of
modernisation. This would help in providing the better form of services to their customers and
meet up to their level of expectations.

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With the inclusion of several kinds of latest technologies within the IT infrastructure, the
Vodafone Group continuously strives to provide better form of services to their customers. They
mainly include these kind of services in order to evolve into a better kind of future.
2. Theme Sections
2.1 Cutting-edge Technology
Based on the interview of Jorge Fernandes who is the CTO at UK Vodafone, primarily
puts a reflection on his 15 years of experience as a mobile operator. During his terms of career,
Jorge has managed to transform the internet protocol (IP). On the viewpoint of Jorge, it has been
discussed that the future of the telecommunication sector is about IP (Oleksiak et al. 2016). The
digital transformation is a critical aspect as this would lead to improved form of services and
better outcomes for the entire organisation. Besides helping in making the systems to perform
better, one of the most vital pressures faced by Vodafone Group is based on the ongoing
provisioning of predictable and stable systems. This would be entirely based on the management
of customer relationship management (CRM) and critical billing systems for their users.
2.2 Change towards a Digital World
In the past few decades, there has been a massive kind of diversification of channels. In
this channels, the customers of Vodafone would generally expect to interface with the network
operator with the support from multiple devices and multiple teams (Borowiecki, Forbes and
Fresa 2016). As per some statements of Fernandes, he stated that the major challenge would be
to decouple the mission-critical and large IT systems, such as the digital interfaces that are used
by customers.

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Fernandes is also responsible for positioning Vodafone Group at the cutting edge in terms
of bringing a major level of innovation within the customer services. Since, the end of 2016, the
employees within Vodafone Group have been able to take the major form of advantage of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered desktop supportable systems (KERR and MOLONEY
2018). These kind of advanced desktop systems make use of chatbots for different IT
supportable requests. The AI powered systems that provide support requests help in solving most
of the encountered problems from clients from all over the world. Jorge Fernandes also states
that 30% of their interaction with customers primarily occurs with the help of chat supported
systems. Hence, they are taking advantages of AI, which is primarily used as an initial interface
to reach to customers.
As per the statements of Jorge, it has also been discussed that Vodafone is in the process
of digitising their services. They are also upgrading their view point of business in order to reach
out to more number of customers (Ai, Peng and Zhang 2018). They are also in the process of
employing experience designers and establishing teams who would be able to build technology
in which new products would be built and various services would be proactively provided to
customers.
3. Missing Issues
From a proper form of investigation of the background of management of information
systems within the organisation, it has been seen that there is a major aspect that has not been
included within the discussion. Although Fernandes has spoken of including various kinds of
improved services that would be able to support the business processes and catering to the needs
of the customers, they have missed out the prime aspect of security (Kanimozhi and Kamatchi
2017). Although the inclusion of chatbots would prove to be a major help for the customers but

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on the other hand the aspect of security within the telecommunication systems would be the
major need in this generation. Security is a major aspect with the designing of
telecommunication networks and hence should be critically evaluated. Securing the aspects of
telecommunication networks would be beneficial for protecting the rights of customers. This
would also be beneficial for bringing changes in the infrastructure of networks with the
alignment of security within the networking systems.
With the digitisation of the entire process of telecommunications, securing the end
systems should be a major concern for the organisation. Highly encrypted systems should be
established within the network systems. This would prove to be extremely helpful in the future
provisioning of networks (Jefferies and Aalborg 2016). The chatbot systems that are
implemented within the telecommunication service should are majorly prone to getting hacked.
Various hackers can pry on to the systems in order to gain access to the chats made within the
customers and the AI systems.
The explosion in the amount of data across the UK sector would continue as there is a
major backup of investment within mobile delivery technology and underlying fixed fibre
infrastructure. Bringing a competitive advantage in the explosion of data for the customers would
also need the inclusion of security aspects within the telecommunication network (Älvebrink and
Jansson 2018). In the recent times, there have been serious kinds of attacks based on ransomware
that has affected the system softwares. With the inclusion of such kind of advanced systems, it
could be concluded that Jorge Fernandes should also primarily focus on including cryptographic
techniques and anti-virus software that would be able to secure the end systems. The company
should also ensure that the several business dealings performed within the organisation should be

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protected and discussed on a private basis. It should not be discussed with any other non-private
subsidiaries so as to incur any kind of future problems.
4. Future Direction
Based on the interview supported by Jorge Fernandes, the volume of data based on
consumer broadband services has majorly overtaken the mobile and media services. The
company has transitioned themselves with the acquisitioning of Wireless and Cable based
services (Thompson et al. 2014). The Vodafone Group has also a huge planning for the evolution
to 5G services. The company has seen the major need of the hour and has thus decides that
moving on to a future having 5G advanced technologies would be helpful in benefiting the
improved customer services. Fernandes has declared that 4G technology would evolve to 5G
technology in the same way as 3G has evolved to 4G with the aid of high speed access (HSPA)
technology. The company has noticed much amount of carrier aggregation in the 4G spectrum.
They are currently in the process of reframing of spectrum (Elshaer et al. 2014). These are
generally considered as the age of evolution on the part of 4G technology. This would eventually
permit customers to gain experience with 5G enabled services.
As per statements of Fernandes, with the advent of 5G services, the core of the network
architecture would be similar. This would be just an extension of the present models of business.
It would also prove to provide a major throughput and lower latency. The second release of
telecommunication services in 5G would prove to be a transformational change within the
telecommunication industry. The inclusion of 5G technology would be able to provide better
kind of improved services to customers (Jaber et al. 2016). As per the statements by Fernandes,
the inclusion of 5G services would be able to meet the increasing demands of customers. They

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would also be able to increase the network infrastructure and provide services that would manage
the raising expectations of customers.

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References
Ai, Y., Peng, M. and Zhang, K., 2018. Edge computing technologies for Internet of Things: a
primer. Digital Communications and Networks, 4(2), pp.77-86.
Älvebrink, J. and Jansson, M., 2018. Investigation of blockchain applicability to Internet of
Things within supply chains.
Anton-Haro, C. and Dohler, M. eds., 2014. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications:
architecture, performance and applications. Elsevier.
Borowiecki, K.J., Forbes, N. and Fresa, A., 2016. Cultural heritage in a changing world.
Springer Science+ Business Media.
ComputerWeekly.com. (2019). Interview: Vodafone CTO juggles legacy network and cutting-
edge technology. [online] Available at:
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450423863/Interview-Vodafone-CTO-juggles-legacy-
network-and-cutting-edge-technology [Accessed 13 Jan. 2019].
Elshaer, H., Boccardi, F., Dohler, M. and Irmer, R., 2014, December. Downlink and uplink
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Conference (GLOBECOM), 2014 IEEE (pp. 1798-1803). IEEE.
Jaber, M., Imran, M.A., Tafazolli, R. and Tukmanov, A., 2016. 5G backhaul challenges and
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Jefferies, N. and Aalborg, K.E.S., 2016. Developments in the Wireless World Research Forum
[From the Guest Editors]. IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, 11(1), pp.30-31.

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Kanimozhi, G. and Kamatchi, K.S., 2017. Security Aspects of Mobile Based E
Wallet. International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and
Communication, 5(6), pp.1223-1228.
KERR, W.R. and MOLONEY, E., 2018. Vodafone: Managing Advanced Technologies and
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Christmann, W., Krupop, S., Cecowski, M., Plestenjak, R. and Cinkelj, J., 2016, July. Data
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