Towards a Baltic Sea Region Strategy in Critical ... - Helsinki.fi

CHAPTER III: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
public sector organizations are also adopting ‘business process re-engineering’
with the aim of minimizing public expenditure, increasing operational efficiency
and improving public services (Anderson 2002; Traunmüller and Lenk 2002).
Collectively, these strategic actions create a complex set of relationships that not
only exist beyond the ICT sector, but also transcend national borders.
Consequently, a new operating environment has emerged, obliging organizations
to compete, cooperate, or do both concurrently, whilst adapting to dynamic market
trends and shifting incentives. This is illustrated by (but not limited to) the
examples below, selected from organizations in the ICT sector.
• Example 1: A wide area fixed network operator who leases bandwidth
from a competing operator in areas not covered by their infrastructure
footprint, and vice versa. This affords both operators large footprint
without the required deployment efforts (ITU-T 2003).
• Example 2: Competing mobile operators who opt (or in some cases,
obliged by regulations) 85 to formulate cell site-sharing agreements with
competitors, so as to reduce the total cost of ownership of the
infrastructure, speed up network roll-outs and reduce visual pollution by
limiting the number of antenna towers.
• Example 3: Non-ICT utility companies who deploy information
infrastructure alongside their own infrastructure, so as to generate extra
revenue streams to supplement income from their core activities. For
instance, the Corenet Oy operates a 5800 km network of
telecommunication cables deployed alongside the Finnish VR rail
network. Another example is Imatran Voima Oy that has deployed
telecommunication cables on the pylons of its Finnish power transmission
network. This ‘dual personality’ implies that the utility company may be
engaged both as a CI and CII owner.
In the context of CIIP, the net result of this intense restructuring within the ICT
sector and the shifting or blurring of both the organization and sector boundaries is
the development of even more complex interdependencies. This inevitably leads to
an increased vulnerability to threats (de Bruijne and van Eeten 2007), and presents
inherent challenges in modelling and analyzing CIIP (Weijnen 2007). To better
visualize the role of technology in an organization and its relevance to CIIP
strategy, we derive a simplified organizational model that adapts select features
from three previously proposed models, namely: the University of Southern
California’s Institute of CIIP (ICIIP) Model (Kiely and Benzel 2006), the 4-Layer
CIP Model (Reinema 2004) and Galbraith’s Star Model (Galbraith 2007). Our
organizational model (see Figure 27) takes the shape of a 3D pyramid (similar to
the ICIIP Model) and includes four nodes or key elements: physical and
technology elements; people; organizational strategy and structure; and
85 The argument for infrastructure sharing is supported by many studies. For example, EUTELIS
(1998) produced a report on “Recommended Practices for Collocation and Other Facilities Sharing
for Telecommunications Infrastructure” to the National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) in
December 1998. Such recommendations have led to the inception of mobile virtual network
operators and switchless operators that offer services even without owning any network
infrastructure.
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