Building a Strategy for Ict-Enabled Services Innovation in the Organization

Introduction

China Railway Construction Engineering Group, an exclusively-invested enterprise of CREC-one of the World Top 500 Enterprises, is a large state owned construction & real estate enterprise with qualification of extra grade enterprise and right to contract foreign projects. Besides its main market--China, CRCEG has also developed its overseas markets such as Tanzania, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Papua New Guinea, South Pole, Sudan and Saudi Arabia etc.

The aim of this essay is to define a clear strategy for my organization about how to use ICT to drive services innovation for strategic value in overseas markets.

If we think about the activities of my organization, China Railway Construction Engineering Group, or CRCEG, our core business is to build large private and public infrastructures, as offices, stadium, railway station, exhibition centers... So our first business focus is that we must be able to build these infrastructures in a competitive way, which means in a time and cost acceptable by our customers, private companies or public institutions. And also because these kinds of projects are normally landmark structures in big cities, so a second one of our focus is that we must be able to build these structures with a high level of quality, which means also in a sustainable way, and with innovative design.

As for ICT for construction enterprises, information management system mostly involves the contents at two levels, one is information management at enterprise level, besides data collection, transfer of documents etc which are the basic working processes of office automation system, it also includes bidding, budgeting, planning, accounting, human resources, market prices of materials & equipments and project information etc; the other is information management at project level, mainly about project design, progress planning, cost management, quality management etc.

In my opinion, the above mentioned two information management systems within CRCEG have currently not been well integrated to achieve the desired information management model with which enterprise guides projects, projects rely on enterprise, a well coordinated development model in which better services with respects to time, cost and quality can be provided to our customers. After having been working in overseas for a quite long period, I realized an effective information management model would be essential to the future success of overseas markets.

Proposed strategy based on SAAS concept

After analyses of current conditions of my organization as well as the ever-increasing standards required by the customers in overseas markets, I believe that the future success depends heavily on our abilities to informationize and localize our operations abroad, in which informationization enables efficiently and effectively transfer of experiences, knowledge and