GROUP ASSIGNMENT 2

Members:

Trịnh Nhật Hoàng Anh - BAFNIU16032

Nguyễn Thị Thanh Thủy - BAFNIU16128

Lê Quang Trí – BAFNIU16130

Nguyễn Trần Hoàng Nhung - BABANS17087

Bùi Thị Quỳnh Như - BAFNIU15004

3.9

Strategic Systems Analysis:

1. The structure of the industry in which T-Mobile is located:

T-Mobile is the third largest provider of postpaid service plans and the largest provider of
prepaid service plans in the U.S. as measured by customer. The wireless telecommunications
industry is highly competitive. Competitive factors within the wireless telecommunications
industry include pricing, market saturation, service and product offerings, customer experience,
network investment and quality, development and deployment of technologies, availability of
additional spectrum licenses and regulatory changes, etc.
- 5 competitive forces at work in the industry:
+ Industrial Competitive Rivalry: If the rivalry among the existing players in an industry is
intense then it will drive down prices and decrease the overall profitability of the industry. T-
Mobile US, Inc. operates in a very competitive Wireless Communications industry. This
competition does take toll on the overall long term profitability of the organization.
Competitors include other national carriers, such as AT&T Inc. (“AT&T”), Verizon
Communications, Inc. (“Verizon”) and Sprint Corporation (“Sprint”).
+ Power of Suppliers: All most all the companies in the Wireless Communications industry
buy their raw material from numerous suppliers. Suppliers in dominant position can
decrease the margins T-Mobile US, Inc. can earn in the market. Powerful suppliers in
Technology sector use their negotiating power to extract higher prices from the firms in
Wireless Communications field. The overall impact of higher supplier bargaining power is
that it lowers the overall profitability of Wireless Communications.
 + Threat of New Entrants: New entrants in Wireless Communications brings innovation,
new ways of doing things and put pressure on T-Mobile US, Inc. through lower pricing
strategy, reducing costs, and providing new value propositions to the customers. T-Mobile
US, Inc. has to manage all these challenges and build effective barriers to safeguard its
competitive edge.
+ Threat of Substitute Products: When a new product or service meets a similar customer
needs in different ways, industry profitability suffers. For example, services like Dropbox and
Google Drive are substitute to storage hardware drives. The threat of a substitute product
or service is high if it offers a value proposition that is uniquely different from present
offerings of the industry.
+ Power of Customers: Buyers are often a demanding lot. They want to buy the best
offerings available by paying the minimum price as possible. This put pressure on T-Mobile
US, Inc. profitability in the long run. The smaller and more powerful the customer base is of
T-Mobile US, Inc. the higher the bargaining power of the customers and higher their ability
to seek increasing discounts and offers.
- The basis of competition is that companies compete to retain the current customer base
and continue to add new customers.
- Direction and nature of change within the industry: The wireless industry in the United
States has been shaped by two driving forces. The first is the rampant mergers and
acquisitions that took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s that led to the current 4
national carriers. The other driving force in the industry is the need to be the first to market
with new features and end-user hardware.
- The momentum: As time elapsed, larger carriers in other areas either bought these smaller
carriers as a supplement to their existing coverage, or the smaller carriers merged with
other smaller carriers in order to be better able to compete with their larger competitors.
This trend had continued until recently
2. The business, firm, and industry value chains for T-Mobile:
- How the company creating value for the customer: Since T-Mobile does not have the
extensive network coverage that the other major carriers do, T-Mobile’s focus is on
providing services that are unique to T-Mobile. T-Mobile has also diversified its wireless
offerings by teaming up with hotels, coffee shops and airports to provide Wi-Fi access
 - Core competencies are those abilities and capabilities that a company has, that provide
some competitive strategic value and satisfy four critical objectives: valuable, rare, costly to
imitate and non-substitutable. T-Mobile leverage its competencies by strongly focusing on
customer services and targeting youth market.
- The Customer base changing in ways that harm T-Mobile through mergers and acquisition.
Of the major carriers, T-Mobile is the smallest in terms of number of customers and network
coverage. However, the company has been highly successful in targeting specific niche
markets and introducing many new and popular services
3. Alignment of IT with with business strategy and goals:
- Because US-based T-Mobile is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, it does not necessarily
have the autonomy to pursue its own diversification strategies. However, T-Mobile is in a
position to take advantage of the parent company diversification strategy.
- IT is improving the right business processes and activities to promote this strategy: Services,
devices and accessories are offered directly to consumers through the retail stores as well as
through our websites and customer care channels. In addition, T-Mobile sell devices to
dealers and other third-party distributors for resale through independent third-party retail
outlets and a variety of third-party websites.
 The company uses information systems: Customers can contact customer service staff directly
through different channels: messaging application, website and phone. Staffs also interact and
coordinate with each other in real time through the use of instant messaging applications,
allowing them to inform each other new situations that arise in the customer community they
are serving (such as weather-related events or service outages) and "meetings" on how to
exchange and handle problems for customer. Members also collaborate in real time using
instant messaging platform. This allows them to warn colleagues about emerging issues in the
communities they serve (for example, weather events and service outages) and ways to attract
advice to customers to listen and suffer Attract throughout the conversation of customers. To
encourage these exchanges, groups have a central board and whiteboard for group chats and
coaching. Finally, they conduct surveys and researches to get the satisfaction level of the current
campaigns and products and know new ways of luring and keeping customers. Using
information form these systems, the managers can evaluate strategies, identify goals and
eliminate things that drive customers crazy.
 Management decisions: As the telecommunications sector is capturing an increasing part of
economy, it is important to know something about the way decisions are made. Managers
should use the “Evolutionary Decision Making” described as this figure below.
The figure represents some of the
characteristics of Evolutionary
decision making:
- Solution options are defined
expectedly because decision makers
cannot agree on clear-cut definitions.
An administrator cannot make a
decision without other stakeholders
(internal and external). The exact
number of stakeholders was not
always possible to plan in advance.
- An optional solution is
implemented just partly. If there is a
strong push back, the administrator
switches to an alternative. This may
happen as many times as the blockages occur, resulting in a zig-zag path. And it may so
happen that after trying many optional solutions, decision makers even get back to the first
option that was discarded a long time ago.
- Evolutionary decision making may deploy TPS, MIS and even DSS. However, given the
maneuvering and struggling aspects of this process, it is difficult to predict if the systems will
really be used and what impacts they can make. Nevertheless, enforcing the use of
Information Systems in public, organizations may contribute to more effective channeling of
their decision processes.