Telecom spends $70M for IT reengineering

Telecom reports it has implemented the first stage of its program to reengineer and update key customer service IT platforms.

“This major IT reengineering programme has been nearly two years in the making and has been completed on-time and on-budget, with only minor post-implementation corrections now required,” says Telecom CEO Simon Moutter.

“The reengineering programme is a significant driver of our long-term strategy,” he says in a statement. “It heralds a profound change for the business by bringing the customer rather than the copper wire connection to the centre of our IT systems architecture for the first time in our 100 year history.

“The first stage of reengineering has delivered major improvements to our foundation system capabilities and to our prepaid mobile customer systems, as well as to some customer facing systems including a brand new website. The foundation capabilities, including the introduction of a best-in-class CRM, provide a solid platform for future stages in the program.

He says the first stage of implementation, costing around $70 million, affected more than 120 major IT systems.

“Implementation over the weekend of 17 and 18 May went very smoothly, albeit switching on the new systems had to be delayed by 12 hours when last Monday, as Murphy’s Law would have it, we experienced an unrelated hardware fault on our internal IT network,” he says, referring to the Telecom systems outage last week.

The next major stage of the reengineering program is scheduled to be completed next year. It will focus on post-paid mobile and building on the foundation laid in the first stage, says Moutter.