SAUCEY FIJI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

CIN 714: Case Study Tutorial Week 11

RWC 2: Jetblue Airways, Westjet Airlines, And Others 1. In the case, both airlines upgraded to the same application but approached the upgrade process differently. What were those differences, and how much impact did they have on the outcome of the project?
Westblue Airways Switched to Sabre after it had shifted to a lighter winter schedule Canceled some flights. Overnight transition of 840,000 files Customers were not informed of the upgrade until the day of switch. This was done to avoid competitors taking advantage They didn't reduce the number of passengers on the flights operating after the cutover Jetblue Airways Did the feasibility study before the project. Switch to new system when they saw low traffic tends which was on Friday night. They trimmed its schedule that January weekend and sold abnormally low numbers of seats on remaining flights. It also developed a backup site. JetBlue also contracted for 500 outside reservations agents JetBlue spent $40 million upgrading its reservation system. The transition was a smooth one The Customers were not affected a lot by the transitions. They did not have long customers waits and booking difficulty.

Approach to Upgrade process

Impact of Upgrade

WestJet Web site crashed repeatedly. Its call center was overwhelmed. It took months to resolve all the issues. Overall WestJet's customer loyalty scores tumbled as a result of long waits and booking difficulties.

2. What precautions did the organizations in the case take to prevent software upgrade problems? To what extent do you believe those helped?
Westblue Airways Customers were not informed of the upgrade until the day of switch. This was done to avoid competitors taking advantage Jetblue Airways It also developed a backup site. JetBlue also contracted for 500 outside reservations agents

Precautions

How it helped

WestJet Web did not benefited much since they ended up having low customer loyalty because site crashed repeatedly and their call center was overwhelmed.

While Jetblues transition was a successful one since Customers were not affected since they had planned well. This was done by having back up site and an extra 500 agents. They had the benefit of observing WestJet's transition and planned well to tackle problems which Westjet faced.

3. SAP customers have the choice between upgrading to the most recent version of the application suite or integrating third-party products into their existing infrastructure. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative?
Advantage Reduces upgrade efforts and cost and helps achieve execution excellence and a high quality upgrade. It also gives accurate estimation of technical effort, monitors technical effort, and assists Transport Management. De-risking through iterative upgrades; detailed cut-over planning Multi-level testing approach minimizing chances of errors going undetected. Continuous innovation with minimal disruption. Upgrading also allows building on and leveraging existing investment, including the SAP skills, best practices, and expertise developed over the years. To integrate into existing SAP infrastructure the software must be certified from SAP The advantages of certification would be: Customer will save in terms of switching to another system. Reduce integration cost with precertified solutions for SAP application Decrease deployment risks Acceleration in Innovation Disadvantage Inability to respond to changes in the business Environment. Locked into relationship by contract and manageability with vendor - a contract can hold a company to the vendor until it expires and it can be unprofitable to switch vendors if switching costs are too high Inflexibility - vendor packages may not fit a company's business model well and customization can be expensive Return on Investment(ROI) may take too long to be profitable Implementations have a risk of project failure Functional expansion increases complexity The price of migration is high Increased cost of ownership

SAPs upgrade to the most recent version of the application suite

Integrating thirdparty products into their existing infrastructure

If the third part software is not SAP certified and compatible then it will be very costly. Lot of downtime Staff skills not upgraded A increase in cost of ownership Has a risk of failure.

RWC 3: PayPal Going Global all Language at a Time 1. One of the challenges that PayPal faces now that they have managed to overcome the polylingual obstacle is finding the best way to put this functionality in the hands of the business, so that they do not have to go through IT each time. How do you balance this need for responsiveness and flexibility versus ITs need to keep some degree of control to make sure everything keeps working with everything else? Provide some recommendations to managers who find themselves in this situation. In todays enterprise environment it is desirable to make each program interoperate with other programs. There is several multi-lingual translation software which a manager can ask the IT team to use and develop and overcome poly-lingual problems. PayPal is an online provider of a very well known and trusted by millions of users worldwide. They prefer PayPal to send and receive money, because almost 95% of payment e - bay using PayPal. Another reason for PayPal provides convenience for transferring money, even to the branch account customers concerned. As the company's largest e-commerce payments, PayPal should be accessible by a variety of users with different language backgrounds. At first the company using methods standard in the industry "web content" in interpreting the content of their site into non-English languages, with the method: Using third-party services that have an impact on the high cost. Using internal resources that PayPal will update their site every 6 weeks that have an impact on declining competitiveness against their competitors. There are many multilingual language translators available in the market. One such example is ROOF. ROOF is an easy and successful way to construct easily maintainable and evolvable large-scale poly-lingual systems by reifying foreign type instances and their operations into first-class language objects and enabling access to and manipulation of them. By doing that we veil the enormously dreadful, hard-tolearn, hard-to-maintain, and hard-to-evolve code that programmers must write or generate today. The competence to write consistent and compressed programs that work with applications based on different type systems enables faster development of complex systems at a fraction of their cost. Definitely, the developers can concentrate on reasoning and the properties of applications to significantly improve their productivity and the quality of the resulting system. Steps taken by PayPal are as follows: PayPal through team development (development team), made by means of a methodology to redesign their sites, so it can directly translate the site when accessed by users from certain countries and languages. In the field of application development, the system is called "simultaneous polylingual shipping". Creating a tool that can identify any additional series of words / phrases that must be translated. This tool will give a different color to the additional series of words / phrases that must be translated. Creating a development tool in the form of "content management" that can be operated by the business. (Source:White Paper - Design of Large-Scale Polylingual Systems by Mark Grechanik, Don Batory, and Dewayne E.
Perry)

2. PayPal opted to deviate from industry standards and build their own custom technology that would better suit their needs. When is it a good idea for companies to take this alternative? What issues factor into that decision? Provide a discussion and some examples Issues in the decision Foreign language and currency Expensive if given to third party Re-architect Reaction Translate the content Localize All Measurements Map the Language Versions in Physical URLs Detect the Users Language Language Selection Avoid regional controls

Before five years this has been a big problem around a long time. So, they needed to use local languages in sites because they thought like if they didnt solve the issue it would hinder their profit. It was the good time when the discussion was made to take the alternative because no other business has been introduced this concept so far if PayPal implements it definitely it will go global. The issue here was like they could give the work to third-party companies who convert multiple languages. But if they cant translate them and send it as smaller text it will be expensive. And also it may slow down the process of translation and profit as well. The companies facing problem in trying to cut and paste code and translate it so they have decided to re-architect its code to accommodate language localization issues. Therefore IT industry standards that exist are not able to provide solutions to business needs with rapid growth companies, the IT team PayPals approach to centralized (centralized way) and to redesign their program code to address the problem of language translation, so the application used to understand the status of user visitors "from which country and what language is used". Besides PayPal idea to choose to build and develop its own technology is due to adjust to his needs after achieving success on polylingual 3. Although the new system has been quite successful, Pay- Pal has chosen not to license this technology to others, forgoing a potentially important revenue stream given the lack of good solutions to this problem. Why do you think PayPal chose not to sell this technology? Do you really think this can be made into a strategic advantage over their competitors? How easy would it be for their competitors to imitate this accomplishment?
In one way; I believe that PayPal did not sell this technology because it has strategic advantage over its competitors. It has the Competitive strategies model which are cost, leadership, differentiation, growth, innovation, and alliances. PayPal has headed its way into Global Market penetration. But overall they have only built it specifically for themselves; PayPal. Other companies can also make their website polylingual using the different types of software developing system that are available in the market. Therefore, other companies code and PayPal coding could be totally different and if one even tries to buy their system it will be a total mess if it does not match with their codes. According to PayPal; Methodology is very important as they said Think about the methodology. That's a really critical part." "Our code base has grown a lot. All of the new code is being built using the right structure. You have to build internationalized." PayPal competitors would find difficulty to imitate the accomplishment because developing such a system needs. Since it requires a lot of work on structural programming but it can be in any language; PayPal has its own way of designing the multilingual system.

RWC 4: Queenss Medical center, National Public radio, Worldspan, and Others 1. The case notes that a changing environment or business priorities can render an ongoing project obsolete even before it has been completed. What alternatives do CIOs who find themselves in this situation have with respect to dealing with the troubled project? Would you go ahead and finish it, or scrap it altogether? How would you justify either position? Backlog will constantly be there for business-users who always want to use an application that innovative and more advanced, and have the knowledge and views of each other what applications they need. Then supported the growing information technology moving fast and business-user wants more and wants it more quickly. This is what can be problems later on. When the project is running, CIOs must complete the work as stated Bob Holstein: "A CIO who has set a goal that the project will be completed but the reality is not completed, meaning that he had to "commit suicide over his career." But there is always a demand new from the people who will eventually be a list of backlog of a CIO. There are basically two types of backlog and are both very different: 1. Backlog of desire: applications highly desired by the user 2. Backlog of commitment: projects that have been approved but not yet implemented A CIO should pay attention to the two types of backlog above. Before you make a choice to keep running and finish the project or stop entirely, the important thing to do is: CIOs need to know the priorities of the organization. Furthermore, CIOs must ensure colleagues in the organization (user) understand and agree with these priorities. CIOs must ensure that all IT projects should be in sync with the initiative and business priorities. After the meetings with project managers, senior company leaders and project sponsors; the CIO can make their choice with consideration of which projects are the most urgent; before making any decision. Here are some of the things that would help CIOs: Do not rush and continuing every backlog just to meet appointment / deliverable. This is when it is done it will result to loss CIO job. Do not ever go into "crash mode" where the CIO pressed IT staff to work overtime to complete the project, or pay for the extra time of the consultant to meet the deadline. Learn every request to run the project, choose which query right to be executed, by looking at the above considerations

2. Do you agree with the statement: Application backlog is not a problem one solves, its a condition one lives with? Why or why not? To the extent that it is true, how can IT executives manage things differently to make this situation more approachable? Provide some specific suggestions. Application backlog can be interpreted as: the accumulation of extra time required information technology applications that can be run in accordance with the plan or design. I have the same opinion with the statement. There are two things that inspire why it can happen in backlog. Business processes, especially those oriented to the interests of customers (customer) growing rapidly. This relates to the interests of company / organization to win the business competition. On the other hand the rapidly evolving information technology, whose main purpose support efficiency and growth The grouping of those two factors is a potential backlog occurs. Business processes growing rapidly, making confidence on information technology is well established. Accomplishment of the new ICT applications, very likely delayed because at the time the application will be implemented, businessuser feel that he needs a higher specification, different with the initial planning. In this condition, there was a discrepancy between the plan the implementation process, which is a backlog to be dealt with between business users, ICT executive and top corporate executives Here we present some suggestions that can be done by the CIO to controlling the application process in order to avoid or minimize potential the application backlog Get approval and ownership of the business-user for planning applications According to Stephen Rood, CIO of Strategic Technology are given allocated time of system developers for system enhancement every year for each department. If the head of the factory has five projects, Rood counting the hours for each project and are usually reported that he only has the resources to only two of the five projects. "If they want to do the third one, I did not say 'no', "said Rood, but department shall pay / allocate budget for consulting services / contractors.As such, it gives them a sense of ownership over the project," he said. Be the Voice of Reason CIOs must be tactical and wise "earthing" user enthusiasm when filed or proposed new system, if not then the potential backlog can occur and difficult to control. Ken Kudla, CIO and VP at The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, always explain to senior management the reasons why a project has the disadvantage from a cost perspective or a technology perspective. "Then we sat as a fellow VP and talk about the cost-benefit and then decide to agree or do not agree, "Said Kudla." Thus, the decision is not only decision or a vote of the CIO alone. " Do not violate rules Every business manager has a project that must be resolved. Although the CIO tends to show that he is a person who likes to help, not ideas the right to put forward a new request projects that have been scheduled. "If project does not meet the criteria as a high priority project, I would not perform a reanalysis on the priority scheduled with IT resources there, "said Bob Holstein, CIO of National Public Radio. nor will he make any promises to anyone about their IT projects. "The commitment will happen when I set the date for deliverables and pointed project manager, "he said

3. Susan Powers at Worldspan says she addresses the backlog problem by positioning her IT organization as a resource that should be used and managed in the most effective manner, like any other a company may have. What do you think of this approach? Is IT really like any other resource? In which way is IT different than other areas of a company like marketing or finance?

I agree to the approach taken by Susan Power in placing or look at the position of organizational information technology in overcoming the above problems. Presently the application of information and communication technologies required in the business world as a tool in the effort to win the competition. In practice, the plan IT is always aligned with the strategic plan of the company, so that every application of IT can deliver value to the company. To be able to know the share of IT departments in the company is to realize the benefits of application of IT technologies in the enterprise, for example: Minimize risk Every business has its own risks, especially related to economical factors in terms of finance. On usually risk starts from doubts in many ways and aspects another external that are beyond the control of the company. Currently, various types of applications are available to reduce the risks often faced by businesses as forecasting, financial advisory, planning experts and others. The presence of technology information other than to be able to help companies reduce business risk No, it should also be a means to assist management in managing risk faced. Reduce costs. The role of information technology as a channeled in a range of ways to reduce the operating costs which thus affects the profitability of the company. By the way: the process of elimination, process simplification, and integration process. Add Value. The next role of information technology is to create value for enterprise customers. The ultimate goal of creating value not only for satisfying customers, but even further to create loyalty so the customer is willing to always be customers for the long term. Create new realities. Various concepts of e-business is kind of e-commerce, e-procurement, e-customer, e- loyalty, and other essentially a new perspective response mechanism in a globalizing business information. Judging from the importance of the role of IT as a backbone that provides support for operations as well as the high demands of the development of IT application, then magnitude of potential problems can be illustrated pending work at IT department will come up to the surface. In this perspective the tolerance of the demands of IT development will be in line the IT department efforts in developing the system in accordance with the demands company with a scale of priorities. Is IT really like any any other resource? By placing IT as a strategic resource, the company which will benefit all the business processes to be efficient and of course precision to yield the right decision. The role of information technology for the company is very important. In its current world, where competition and fluctuations business world so high that the application not only as supporting IT tools alone, but a strategic resource, where the function and its role is more comprehensive and more widely linked to the vision, mission and goals of the company. But often the application of IT to fail because many IT projects are always delayed (Backlog) and prolonged to spent a lot of money but have no end result. Challenge and an obstacle; to many companies because sometimes top executives do not have a vision for their IT investments. It can be said that the company requires efficiency and accuracy in the information should be put IT as strategic resource to improve and develop its business.

In which way is IT different than other areas of a company like marketing or finance? The main difference lies in the characteristics of the Information Technology. IT was always growing from the old system to a new system. In the era of the 80s DOS operating system was used and data storage was very little. Transfer data to the system or other far-flung network still slow and impractical, the technology has become so out and inefficient. In an era the 90's have used Windows operating systems and storage media more Small in size but can hold more data and ease of the Internet for transfer more data and faster. In the era of the 2000s the IT more mobile and more advanced, so that the things mentioned above becomes obsolete. If a company wants to up-grade, it will soon be behind because in the short time the system appears old, and more advanced systems are developed. Meanwhile, if the company continues to exist with the system long let alone survive in the long term, the company cannot compete with other companies whose systems are more advanced and efficient than they would be difficult to establish networking with corporate clients or competitors. Other differences in the employment relationship. Other divisions within the company run function by relying on the development of IT systems, as well as benefit ease and efficiency of the development of IT technology. Therefore the demand for always use new systems or technologies or to upgrade the existing system there, such as being a necessity. While the division of IT for development depends on the financial capacity of the company, while the other divisions within perform its functions largely depends on system administration and data developed and managed by the IT Division. IT as strategic resources for a company that is quite unique role where the role covers the entire business process from upstream to downstream. IT could be important part in the process of marketing, operations, and finance to create winning effective and efficient system. Therefore, the development of IT in an organization absolute must continue to be developed to create value for the organization to have strong competitiveness.

Reference
1. SAP Integration and Certification Center, January 2009 http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/30d81f27-e680-2b10-bea4e3b43c217b72?QuickLink=index&overridelayout=true&38173669327762 2. Mark Grechanik, Don Batory, and Dewayne E. Perry ,2003 , Design of Large-Scale Polylingual Systems ,UT Center for Advanced Research In Software Engineering (UT ARISE), University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712. 3. http://www.cio.com/article/164400/Project_Management_Battling_the_Backlog Accessed date: 15th April, 2013. 4. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/hci2020/downloads/beinghuman_a3.pdf Accessed date: 15th April, 2013. 5. http://www.srlst.com/ijist/ijism-Vol6No1/ijism61-59-72.pdf Accessed date: 15th April, 2013. 6. http://www2.cit.cornell.edu/oit/Reports/2003/ITRolesResp_Nov03.pdf Accessed date: 15th April, 2013.