Troubleshooting Information Systems at the Royal Hotel

ITC 6020 information system design and development

Gang Yang

Read Case Study: Troubleshooting Information Systems at the Royal Hotel

Case overview

This case is about troubleshooting an information system in the Royal Hotel. Blake is working on a summer intern to help the Royal Hotel to improve their service system. The manager of the hotel mentioned that the maintenance and cleaning staff sometimes will make mistakes in their work. Then those mistakes will directly be noticed by the guests of the hotel, and that’s a really unacceptable issue for the hotel. Therefore, the manager asked Blake to help them build a system to for the hotel, so the guest could directly reflect problems to the maintenance team and manger could use it to observe their staffs.

For this case, Blake was introducing the M-Tech’s Cappuccino Rapid Response Solution to the manager. There are four main advantages for this solution: The first one is it allow the housekeeper to report the problems of the room as soon as possible, and they don’t need to wait until they check every single room. The second one is it will record the issue that housekeeper reflect on the system, so they will not forget it. The third one is it will help the maintenance department directly go to the room and fix the problem before it happens again. The final one is the machine will record all the history and manager could use these reports to reward the most activated employees.

However, even the manager invested a lot of money, the system was not accepted by the employees and just abandoned soon after roll-out. And the director of IT mentioned that all the installation and training session were completely done. Also, the employees said even the old manual system worked much better for their needs.

Discussion questions

1. Despite having relatively little specific information about why the system failed, what do you think are the main reasons for such failure?

        The major issue is that Blake just skip the analysis the issue before he made this extremely important decision. He just jumped into the IT solution part before he fully understood what’s the most important problem of the old manual system. Also, he didn’t do any research about the employees of the hotel. Therefore, he can not really understand what kinds of design and system is most benefit for these users.

2. How could you fix these problems?

        If I am Blake, I would make sure to do some research of the old manual system, and interview some of the employees about what do they think of the old system, and what kind of new functions that they want in the new system. Also, it’s extremely important for me to keep staying in here before they complete all the project. As a designer, we need to observe all the process during the installation and make sure every step is working well, and each function is display as we wish. Also, I would try to communicate with Jack, and figure out why the new system wasn’t accepted by the employees and attempt to update a new version basing on the present system, so we could reduce the cost as much as we can.

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