In this paper IT infrastructure issues and challenges faced by New Zealand Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) names Kiwi Experience are discussed. The research outcome of this paper is useful to Small and Medium Business Enterprises for better IT management. The rest of the paper is organized as follows, section II list out the general IT infrastructure that physically spreads over the entire branch offices, and head offices. The managerial issues and challenges over this IT infrastructure in small and medium business enterprises are discussed. In section III and section IV discusses a strategy could help with new opportunities provided by recent advancements of Big Data to achieve their business objectives.

The limitation of this study are the other three components of e-commerce business model components that could have become part of the study were not taken into consideration like market opportunity, competitive environment and management team. Also the length of study by conducting the analysis and research are not sufficient time.

Activity A: Journal

Date	Research Activity / Duration	Resource used / Website visited	Time/ Duration
15/10/2018	Research on E-Commerce journal title: ‘An Introduction To Electronic Commerce’ wrote by Nanehkaran 2013 on online library (EBSCOhost) on UUNZ UPortal.	https://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/ (Nanehkaran 2013)	3 hours
16/10/2018	Research and study on the travel company based in New Zealand, selected Kiwi Experience Bus Tour Company as the background of this research.	Homepage URL: https://www.kiwiexperience.com/	3 hours
17/10/2018	Study the chapter 5 related to Information Technology Infrastructure. I searched for journal related to IT Infrastructure (10:00 am) and wrote report describe the travel organisation’s current IT infrastructure.	Laudon and Laudon text book	3 hours
18/10/2018	Research on issues and challenges that the organisation faces in the management of its IT infrastructure on online library (EBSCOhost) on UUNZ UPortal. Write about identification of issues and challenges that management faces of IT infrastructure.	https://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/	3 hours
19/10/2018	Research on journal or articles related to Emerging technologies on online library (EBSCOhost) on UUNZ UPortal.	https://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/	3 hours
20/10/2018	Research for Big Data journal or articles on online library (EBSCOhost) on UUNZ UPortal.	https://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/	5 hours
21/10/2018	Research on strategy to help the Tour company leverage Big Data to achieves its Business objectives on online library (EBSCOhost) on UUNZ UPortal.	https://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/	3 hours
22/10/2018	Prepare and wrote about the some issues that strategy must consider.	Microsoft Word and Zotero	3 hours
23/10/2018	Write and finalise the executive summary, letter of transmittal this research analysis with reference from Communication Skills Handbook 4edn.	Microsoft Word and Zotero	3 hours
25/10/2018	Summarise the key findings and recommendation to CEO related to E-commerce, IT infrastructure, Big Data analysis.	Microsoft Word and Zotero	3 hours
27/10/2018	Checking grammar and spelling of the readiness of the assignment and finalise assignment for submission before due date.	https://uportal.uunz.ac.nz/mod/turnitintooltwo/view.php?id=6849&forceview=1	1 hour
31/8/2018	Doing final check before summitting the assignment to UUNZ UPortal.	https://uportal.uunz.ac.nz/mod/turnitintooltwo/view.php?id=6310	3 hour

Activity B: Report to CEO

Part 1: Introduction: Background of selected organisation

Kiwi Experience is an online leading backpacker bus tour company, providing the ultimate hop-on, hop-off bus travel concept adventure tours for 30 years as their primary services. The Kiwi Experience bus passes are super flexible and personalise their trip via bus network to suit backpackers and independent travellers needs. The corporate vision of Kiwi Experience is travellers can get the most out of their trip and encounter the real New Zealand. The mission of Kiwi Experience is ‘to offer flexible New Zealand bus tour network with guarantee best price on activities and accommodation to all the travellers’. Their goals are to offer best price guaranteed on bus tours packages and accommodations to traveller from all over the globe that suit their needs, to gain customer reliable and trust on them. In addition, they hire only local (kiwi) passionate driver guides who have travelled the world themselves and know how to impressive of good time during travelling. Meantime, Kiwi Experience bus fleet is made up of new vehicles, their operator have an outstanding safety records as a result of regular training and exceptionally high standards.

Kiwi Experience is proud to have won the 2017 Mega Efficiency Impact Award at the NZI Sustainable Business Network Awards. This award is special to Kiwi Experience because it acknowledges their “green not mean” philosophy that being New Zealander that have honours to share this paradise to travellers by focused on protecting the environment for next generations.

According to Almunawar & Anshari (2014) establishes that tour company need to plan new tour packages to attract the more tourists and given discounts or promotion to the loyalty tourists who used to book with them in order sustain their businesses. Kiwi experience business strategy is offer travellers to choose a Kiwi Experience Bus pass which includes ‘unlimited travel’, once traveller completed their trip in full, they can travel the full route again as many times as they like for up to 12 months. Once the traveller on board the Kiwi Experience bus, they have guaranteed accommodation for the first night’s stay in each new location along with their bus itinerary. Electronic commerce will generate a tour package name, tour package description to provide tour package information on the website. The main functions in e-commerce software are online blogs, tour package listing, travel forum, customer reviews, Book now, and credit card payment processing.

Homepage URL: https://www.kiwiexperience.com/

Part 2: IT Infrastructure and Emerging technologies – Management Issues

2.1 Current IT Infrastructure for Kiwi Experience

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Figure 2.1 The IT Infrastructure Ecosystem

Laudon & Laudon (2015) identifies seven primary components in IT infrastructure includes: computer hardware platforms, operating systems platforms, enterprise software applications, networking and telecommunications technology, consultants and system integrators, data management and storage, and Internet platforms (see Figure 2.1 The IT Infrastructure Ecosystem – (Laudon & Laudon 2015).

According to Vladimir (1996) identifies that IT infrastructure is the primary framework for electronic commerce includes hardware, software, databases and communications with functionality as the World Wide Web on the Internet or other message on the other telecommunication networks.

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Table 1: Common IT infrastructure in SMEs

Types of Infrastruture	Purposes
Mail Server	Internal and external mail communications
Web Server	Corporate web content services
Domain Server	Domain Name registrations
Application Server	Business applications varies from industry to industry
Antivirus Server	Protection from Virus, Malware and Spam
Authentication server	Provides user and device authentication to access the IT resources
Storage Server	Provides data backup to avoid the data loss, storage space ranged from Terabytes to Petabytes
Intranet Server	To all internal communications such as company news, circulars, birthday greetings of Employee and others
Portable Clients	Laptop, Ipad, Iphone, Palm PCs, Tablet PCs, Wearable Devices used for portable IT usage
Backbone Cables	Backbone network is OFC Leased Line ranged from gbps to mbps, RF, WiMax or other medium of communications
Router	Provides Routing from internal to external network
Firewall	Provides content filtering and allow or deny the digital content based on the stated policies
Intrusion Detection System	Provides malfunction detection, analysis of attacks
Wireless Access Points	Controller based Access Points spread across the campus and have the features of Bandwidth Management, Seamless Roaming, User authentication, Rogue AP Management and Device Authentication and others
CCTV Cameras	Photo and Video capturing for recording and for monitoring.
Scanners	Digitization of documents.
LCD Projectors	Projection facility for group or mass presentation to share the knowledge.
UPS	Provides the regulated power supply without any surge and interruption

Computing hardware platforms: Includes mainframes, desktop and laptops, and mobile handheld devices that connects company staffs, customers, and vendors into a coherent digital environment.
Telecommunications services: Data, voice, and video connectivity among employees, customers, and vendors.
Data management and storage: organizing data storage and managing the company’s data and analyze data for efficiently accessed and used.
Application software: Includes enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and knowledge management systems.
Physical facilities management: Develop and manage the physical installations for computing, telecommunications, and data management.
IT management: Planning and developing the infrastructure, coordinate IT services among business units, managing accounting for IT expenditures, and provide project management.
IT standards: Policies that determine which information technology will be used, when, and how.
IT education: Employee training in system use and management training for IT investments.
IT research and development: Research future IT projects and investments that can help the firm differentiate itself from competitors.

IT infrastructure is used to connect different parts of the company and relationship with service providers, users and other associates’ company in e-business. Weill & Vitale (2002) describes that IT formation as ‘the company’s information technology infrastructure’ and composed of four elements.

IT Components (the technologists’ view of the infrastructure building blocks),
Human IT Infrastructure (the intelligence used to translate the IT components into services that users can draw upon),
Shared IT Services (the users’ view of the infrastructure),
Shared and Standard Applications (Kiwi Experience applications).

Above this four-part infrastructure are Local Applications (fast-changing applications that draw on the infrastructure). In turn, this internal IT infrastructure is linked to public infrastructures such as the Internet and telecommunications networks and to external industry-based infrastructures such as credit card payment systems.

2.2 Information Infrastructure Issues and Challenges

There are five significant challenges confronting managers:

IT infrastructure is the primary investment of the company. Management needs to allocate financial budget for IT infrastructure investment, and consideration of how much amount of money invested in IT infrastructure is adequate. Otherwise, the company should decide whether to purchase own IT assets or rent them from the external suppliers. The existing IT infrastructure purchased from different suppliers at different period of time. Veerasamy (2015) states that the ‘use, reuse or scrap’ the existing infrastructure is an intricate task to the IT team. The backup, standby IT support services are very important for IT Infrastructure. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract that identifying the service responsibilities between the IT service provider and the business customer (Laudon & Laudon 2015). Eventually, the services and outcomes of SLAs mainly support to the business customer. IT service providers provide a wide variety of cloud services and all services record in SLA.

The company have to make necessary changes in employee and management behaviour, develop new business models, retire old work rules, and eliminate the ineffectiveness of business processes and organisational structures. As with new technology alone will not produce meaningful business benefits.

The organisation cannot adapt to change due to the saddle with expensive and unmanageable information technology platforms. There are constraints on business strategy and execution as information systems are so complicated. Organisations have to analyse the company five-year business strategy and assess business alignment with the company business plans that will benefit fully from information technology, good productivity, and become competitive and productive. The company need to determine the total IT infrastructure cost by performing a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. The TCO can be used to help the company analyse the direct and indirect cost of the technology implementation.

Weill & Vitale (2002) asserts that IT personnel and business officer have had difficulty discussing infrastructure needs and business models because they have not had a common language.

According to recent studies NeSmith n.d. claims that security is the biggest challenge faced by small and medium sized business because of the shortage of cyber security professionals. User awareness and education is vital to protect the IT infrastructure. Cybercrimes suck as Hacking, Denial of Services, Viruses, Credit Card Frauds, Phishing, Spoofing, Corporate Espionage, Threads from internal employee, Cyber-attacksand others are unpredictable challenges to manage the IT infrastructure in a secured way.

2.3 Emerging Technology for Travel Industry

The travel company noted that Internet Of Things (IoT) has the unlimited possibility to form the travel industry in the future. One of the impressive example is Lufthansa introduced smart baggage tracking solution via a link found on their mobile boarding pass to track and retrieve belt and informed the precise delivery time of baggage in Lufthansa application (‘Digital baggage services – Lufthansa ® United States of America’ n.d.).

Travellers nowadays preferable the online website that is easily accessible and user-friendly. Nanehkaran (2013) demonstrates that the online business is growing very fast pace caused by ease of conduct, 24/7 availability, ubiquitously and anytime when they are available, and reduce transaction cost. Travellers are empowered by using the new approach, making the reservation through the online Web or an app downloaded from their mobile phone. They can check and compare the price of the online travel packages that suit their needs and make the booking instantly through web booking without time and location constraints.

However, travellers who used the web reservation provide their payment details online which their credentials and banking details can be leak and hack by the cyber-hacker and dangerous to the tourists if the web provider did not have a well-planned security system.

Some tour companies make use of virtual reality (VR) to engage the customer viewing their preferred destination such as exploring the whole national parks or ski resort for their marketing purposes and customers’ experiences improvement. Many travel websites also use Chatbot to quickly answer any queries that a customer may have during a booking or research process. Thus, Artificial Intelligence (AI) expedite the process performance by improving quality and reducing operational costs.

For small to medium-size businesses such as travel company should using cloud computing for businesses as they can access to business everywhere with compatible device, save time and cost to boost ticket sales and promoting innovation.

Part 3: Big Data – Background and recommended strategy

3.1 Big Data

3.1.1 What Big Data is about

Big Data means different things to people with different backgrounds and interests. Traditionally, the term Big Data has been used to describe the massive volumes of data analysed by huge organizations like Google or research science projects at NASA. But for most businesses, it’s a relative term: “Big” depends on an organization’s size. The point is more about finding new value within and outside conventional data sources. The sources of Big Data is from everywhere. Big data may came from Web logs, radio-frequency identification (RFID), global positioning systems (GPS), sensor networks, social networks, Internet-based text documents, photography archives, video archives, and large-scale e-commerce practices. Big Data is typically defined by three “V”s characteristics (Laudon & Laudon 2015):

Volume: Large scale of data are generated continuously increase exponentially.

Variety: Different form of structured and unstructured data

Clickstreams and ad impressions capture user behaviour at millions of events per second

Velocity: Analysis of streaming different type of data are generated and processed rapidly to extract useful information and relevant insights through a single application. For instance, YouTube is a good example that illustrates the fast speed of Big Data.

3.1.2 The Potential of Big Data

The potential of Big Data are increase od storage capacities, processing power and availability of data in different data types that comes from everywhere. For example, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, and purchase transaction.

According to Marr n.d., we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day; IBM claims that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

3.1.3 How Businesses are using Big data

Big data is transforming the way businesses conduct operations. Data is gathered in many ways through online searches, analysis of consumer buying behaviour and companies use this data to improve their profit margin and provide an overall better experience to customers.

3.1.4 Business Opportunities and Benefits from Big Data

The travel industry includes variety range of businesses, such as rental car companies, hotels accommodation, and tour packages. With availability of personal data from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, each companies predict on traveller’s preferences, customer experience improvement and to meet the unique needs of each customer. Travel company personalise tour packages in most possible to buy with special promotions, and deals to their customers. For example, a Sky City Hotel determine that customers is mainly younger adults, thus host a concert or event regularly to attract more visitors. Travel businesses may improve customer experience through personalization to create better customer intimacy or loyalty and to get more referrals, eventually better business outcome.

3.1.5 Problem and drawbacks of Big data

Though Big Data in the travel industry is still in its early stages, the industry is trying to overcome the challenges like lack of expertise such as data scientists, affordable infrastructure, and deployment costs.

The drawback of Big Data is all these types of data need to linked together in order to extract useful knowledge for decision making.

3.1.6 The Future of Big Data and the Next Steps for taking Advantage of Big Data

The integration of big data and machine learning will allow travel providers to create entirely new products and services. For example, The traveller can discover the location that they like that featured on the film through a single touch of the screen with additional information such as weather forecasts, and the opportunity to book travel to that destination. This is the convergence of entertainment, media and travel into a single offer and enabled by data and analytics.

3.2 Strategy Recommendation to Help the Organisation leverage Big Data to Achieve Business Objective

The reason of the organisation should consider investing in Big data:

Michael Minelli, Michele Chambers and Ambiga Dhiraj. n.d. highlights that ‘ Real-time big data is about the ability to make better decisions and take significant actions at the right time for the company in place of just a process for storing petabytes or exabytes of data in a data warehouse’.

Recent research from Clement (2016) finds organizations are using customer centricity strategies tap into internal data will allow travel company to prominent, and build a better IT Infrastructure ecosystem to enjoy greater customer loyalty and increased revenues.

Technology becomes an alternative for traditional investment such as employees, buildings, and equipment. Information technology helps lower transaction costs by cooperate with external vendors in place of doing entirely in-house. Information technology reduces the levels of hierarchy in an organization because information flows more freely and more widely through the firm. The impact of information technology on both of these theories shows why firms can reduce the number of employees while maintaining or increasing the levels of production.

To understand the impact of how data has transformed our daily lives, look no further than how the movie rental experience has changed. When Kiwi Experience bus tour packages were booked by travellers, the tour agent would base their recommendations or reviews on which tour packages the customer liked and a large amount of their own opinion. Today, Tour reservation companies can utilize a vast array of data points to generate recommendations. By analyzing the customer reviews on the tour activities, as well as user activities such as internet searches, and browsing and scrolling within a webpage, recommendations can be tailored for millions of customers in real time and approximately 75% of views at a leading provider are now driven by these recommendations.

Decision making is pushed to lower levels of the hierarchy. Information Technology enhance the decision making by management because accessible to information more rapidly and precisely. Professional personnel work with self-managing. Decision making becomes more decentralized. Workers rotate from team to team depending on the tasks at hand.

Data on communications between employees within organisation can be gathered and monitored easily via internal and external website, phone calls and email traffic. This data sources may help to reveal company networks and measure communication flows between organizational divisions, branches, and units at various hierarchy levels. However, employees are not aware that they communication is being monitored. Thus, it is important to strictly adhere to privacy laws and research ethics codes that protect employees, travellers, and other agents.

Most importantly, information systems must be built with a clear understanding of the organization in which they will be used. What works for one company may not work for another. As information systems such as SAP and SalesForce.com proliferate, the danger is that these systems will not work in organizations whose structures aren’t a good fit. In those cases, the organization must align itself with the information system rather than the other way around.

Organization can measure the success of its Big Data with good governance model. It encompasses consistent guidance, procedures and clear management decision making. Organizations need to ensure standard and exhaustive data capture; they need not protect all the data, but they need to start sharing data with in-built protections with the right levels and functions of the organization.

The governance framework offers solutions for the immediate need to access data, to substantially lower the cost of data storage and, more importantly, to do more with the rapidly growing amount of unstructured data.

The supporting tools, solutions and skills the organisation needs to have for success

Organisation need to hire data scientists and personnel with expertise in statistical and quantitative analysis tools like R, SAS and Stata will have a key role to play in successful initiatives (‘What skills will your organisation need to make big data work?’ 2015).

An understanding of key Hadoop components such as MapReduce will be necessary for businesses to succeed in their big data implementation. Hadoop can be tricky to use due to a steep learning curve, but as it will have a central role to play in any big data applications, a strong grounding in the technology will be hugely advantageous.

You may hear the term data governance used to describe many of these activities. Promoted by IBM, data governance deals with the policies and

processes for managing the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data employed in an enterprise, with special emphasis on promoting privacy, security, data quality, and compliance with government regulations.

4.1 Conclusions

To conclude, Big Data technology alone is not adequate. While company investing in the systems and tools agility is imperative, organisations must also be prepared to achieve cultural change through fostering curiosity (Clement 2016).

List of References

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Bus Tour Company E-Commerce and IT Infrastructure