Telecom works on next step to Oracle

By ADAM GIFFORD

Telecom New Zealand expects a wait of 18 months to two years before its Oracle customer relationship management system is being used.

Information systems strategy manager Greg Patchell says the product has just finished a three-month "proof of concept" step, and the team is now considering where the next investment is needed.

"The intention of the proof of concept was to prove the whole application stack could hang together," Patchell says.

"Tossing Oracle or any other enterprise application into a large organisation means you have to use EAI [enterprise application integration] technology, synchronise databases and so on."

He says if the Oracle system is to work, the customer database held in Telecom's ICMS billing system must be replicated to an Oracle 9i database and kept synchronised.

Other databases with other aspects of customer information must also be integrated so Telecom sales and call-centre staff can get a full picture of the customer.

"It will cost several million dollars to do that. We are going though the process now of writing the business case for populating the database."

Patchell says progress so far has shown that a lot of infrastructure work is needed "to get the data quality to a state where it can work".

He says Telecom wants to rebuild its information systems architecture so it is more flexible and uses standards-based technology.

Telecom is also looking at ways it can take elements of ICMS, which is an older "green screen" application, and wrap them in layers of XML (extensible markup language) so they can be delivered in other applications.

Patchell says that meanwhile Telecom will continue to use a Vantive customer relationship management application, now a part of Peoplesoft, to deal with its corporate customers.