Case Study: Troubleshooting Information Systems

Troubleshooting Information Systems at the Royal Hotel This is a case of Blake, a young, inexperienced professional, taking on an internship with a consulting company, who assigns him to manage the Royal Hotel in New York City, a luxury hotel which catered to businesses and had a large number of repeat guests.

This case emphasizes the difficulties Blake faces in helping the hotel consistently keep the rooms in excellent condition while trying to implement ways to make it happen.

Also, it emphasizes the importance of communication with other parties before implementing major changes. The elements from Chapter 2 that are emphasized in this case are efficiency, effectiveness, firm culture, firm strategy, information systems, and information technology. The concept of information technology is emphasized by the proposed use of handheld devices to communicate the needs for each individual room. These devices also use the concept of information systems to collect the information submitted and take note of it.

Efficiency and effectiveness are emphasized by ascribing the successes and failures of implementing a new system and filling the company’s needs. Also, the firm culture is mentioned by stating that this hotel is “not most hotels,” and also the firm strategy is evaluated by implementing a new system to report problems. I believe one of the reasons for the failure of the Espresso! Project was leaving it in the hands of Jack, someone who did not have his full vote of confidence in the first place.

Also, there is nothing in the passage that indicates that he knew anything about the reliability of the new system or how successful other companies were in sing it. Furthermore, there could have been some deficiencies in the training process which prevented employees from getting a full understanding of the system and being able to adapt to change.

One way to fix these problems would be to allow for additional training on the new system.

This would not only allow the product to work more efficiently, but also allow the employees to see for themselves the benefits of this new automatic system. Also, he could have looked into any user problems by consulting other companies who had used this system in the past in order to get advice as to how to solve them. Taking hose steps would have been more effective in ensuring the success of this project. There are many things Blake could have done differently over the course of this project.

For one, he could have possibly tried to find other people to hand the project off to after he accepted the new project. After handing it off to Jack, he should have sat down with him and made sure Jack had a full understanding of what he had to do, so he could answer any questions to clear up any doubts. Also, in taking on a new project, he should have consulted his boss as to how to handle the turning over of the current project to a new person.