A mobile incident management tool for telecommunications companies : a case of MTN Uganda

Abstract

The fast evolution on the services provided by telecommunication companies has equally created new challenges for the Telecoms, which demand new innovative approaches to counter. MTN like many other organizations has been faced with challenges managing incidents that occur but in a customer centric manner. This master’s research project focused on an internal business process improvement project regarding the incident management process at MTN as a case study. Incident management had been previously implemented at MTN but improvements were needed due to identified knowledge gaps in the current process especially extending the incident management system to the customers. The main objectives were to find out how incident management was currently done and its challenges, how the related incident management and its resolution times could be reduced through designing a mobile incident management tool that would allow access to the knowledge base and direct logging of incident tickets by customers. In order to evaluate the tools user-friendliness and meeting user requirements, a validation guide was provided to the end users to assess the effectiveness of the tool. The choice of research methodology was mixed methods where the researcher combined design science (hevner,2004) and case study (Yin, 2009). Design science guided the process of coming up with the final output of the research which was a Mobile Incident management tool for telecommunications companies while case study guided the entire research process leading to the innovative artifact (M-SIM).