Importance of Upgrading the IT Infrastructure of a Water Company

South Australia Water Company
Institution:
Date:
Background Information
Back in the late 1990s, the Australian government turned out to be concerned with added water quality and environmental problems. It added these as one of its priority agendas. The government also urged corporations to be more commercial, more customers focused and to come up with a dynamic export focused water industry entailed on water testing laboratory to ensure provision of high quality water supply (Torogoon et al, 2004).
In an effort to see growth to the corporation’s structure, the government appointed Anne Howe as the new CEO of the South Australian Water Company. Howe faced some challenges in her efforts to transform the publicly owned corporation. The challenges were based on the past outstanding culture in the company of being inflexible to change especially in the area of Information Technology (Baillat, 2010). However, Howe being a transformational leader endowed with years of experience introduced new strategies. Her first strategy that she introduced was to organize the organization alongside functional ranks with a detached business unit to control the water testing laboratory. The major functional unit was water services that were carried out in February 2003. This was done by John Ringham who incorporated operations, retail and infrastructure, projects and engineering. The unit also partnered with United water in the implementation of water projects and their follow up.
Case Situation
South Australia Water had a status for uncompleted projects as well as poor IT performance. This company did not invest much in IT and various business entities evaded the IT function. SA Water also did not devote in the Geographical Information System away from its early implementation back in the 1980s.
In 1999, David Johnston was appointed as CIO by the CEO. At that point, the IT infrastructure was incapable to manage industry standard systems. For instance, it couldn’t support effectual email services. Johnston came up with the notion of business focused IT and commenced to lift the IT profile all over the organization. Johnston managed to close most of the old unfinished proposals and projects and won support for a key improvement in IT Infrastructure to maintain the growth of new systems in 2000. In 2001, a new email system was accessible, followed by a triumphant extensive upgrade of PCs (Torogoon et al, 2004).
Key Problems
IT infrastructure-SA Water didn’t devote much on IT and this developed major hiccups in running the organization. The customer support system did not work efficiently hence not meeting customers’ demands
Overdependence of river Murray-the government had shown reliance of Murray ignoring alternative water supplies such as harvesting storm water (Baillat, 2010).
Response to the Problems
Johns...