UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
     
    COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM


                presents


 "Information Technology Failure and the 
            Collapse of ONE.TEL"




               speaker:

            Prof. David Wilson 
(Associate Dean, Faculty of Information Technology
     University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)
                 


          19 June 2002 (Wednesday)

             Seminar Room LB252 
               Hatfield Campus
                 1:30 pm 


        EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO ATTEND!

 Tea/coffee &  biscuits will be available.



Abstract:

There are a number of cases of IS failure. However, few IS failures have 
led to the downfall of the business. This paper examines the information 
technology strategies employed by the high-profile Australian 
telecommunications company One.Tel Limited and assesses the extent to which 
a failure of those strategies may have contributed to, or precipitated, 
One.Tel's downfall. With increased reliance on technology in business and 
its sophistication, potentially catastrophic failures may be more common in 
the future

One.Tel was founded in 1995 as an Australian telecommunication company and 
ceased trading in 2001. In the middle of 1999, the focus of the company 
changed towards the building of a global business, geared to the delivery 
of media content. We argue that the IT strategies operating within One.Tel 
were not adapted to meet the rapid growth that ensued. Further, we suggest 
that the information technology approaches that had served adequately in 
the early years were not appropriate for its later ambitions. Most 
importantly, we discuss the failure of its billing system in relation to 
published frameworks of IT failure as well as the importance of getting 
such basic systems right. We argue that these frameworks do not cover well 
the One.Tel case and we put forward a new category of IT failure, that of 
'business ethos'

Key words: IS failure, One.Tel, IS strategy, Business ethos, Case study

--
Colloquium Abstracts:
On-line: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq/