Name: Bassal Mehmood Talha Matriculation no: 75681 Case: STARS air ambulance: An information systems challenge
Q1: What are the underlying business process and system problems at Stars? Ans: Stars air ambulance service is medical emergency service that provides fast medical support to the seriously ill or injured patients and handle emergencies and can also transfer patients from one medical facility to the other depending on the requirement of the patients situation. Although it seems to be a very critical business in nature and assumptions can be made that such a business would have their business processes laid out well defined and every department would know its job completely and systems would be properly places but that seems not to be the case in Stars, and surprisingly the most critical department which is IT and IS doesn't even have well defined roles and their leaders or managers don’t know what are their jobs and responsibilities are and how to carry them out. All of the managers and consultants working in Stars are working on ad hoc basis, every other department in the organization asks for help from Information systems department based on their need. There are highly paid consultants working full time and 250 workers working full time with an addition of volunteers and community at large but a big part of the problem was lack of awareness across the organization of the critical nature of IT over time and that at an organizational level IT was not given that much of importance. Khan the CIO of Stars saw that among many problems in the organization there was significant need of effective communication and information systems. He needed to improve the IT system and stabilize information systems and to create fundamental changes in the existing organizational performance. Stars Information system group employed seven full time employees, three full time consultants and one manager, supplemented from time to time by additional consultants. One of the full time consultants was a network administrator, one was a developer and the other was involved in continuity planning. Off the permanent staff, some maintained existing systems, and three worked on systems development, but for the most part the roles of the employees were not well defined, in fact in some cases they did not even knew what their responsibilities were. Lack of uniformity in systems development practices throughout the organization, departments had "self appointed" project managers, a distributed IS budget in which some individual departments purchased their own computer equipment and developed their own independent applications and instructing IS department to implement it, as a result of such issues and disconnection between centralized IS function and IS personnel working in other departments, it was not even possible to determine total cost of IS for the organization. IS had too many servers, each server handling only one application and such servers were out of warranty periods they cost a lot to Stars for maintenance, also stabilization to the other physical infrastructure was needed such as cables and power supply systems,
concerns for security of the systems were also on the top priorities of Khan because whenever Stars suffered a security breach, consultant would jump in to fix the problem and then later charge $20000 for a day’s work. Employees enjoyed working at their own pace and pursued activities they preferred or to which they were pressed for, and problems were dealt contingently, consultants were called and then later they billed the company ridiculous amounts of money for their one day services, having in mind that Stars was already strict on their budget, all the other departments were also not working effectively as the finance department would not question those heavy fee's that they had to pay for days work or the human resource department which was unable to recruit the people fit for job, or question their position in the organization and the responsibilities they had, appraisal systems were not effective due to which such jumbled up departments were working the way they wanted. all of such deficiencies resulted in financial losses, tight budgets, inefficiencies of the departments and lack of well defined roles of employees and departments as a whole. Q2: What should be the role of Information services and Information technology at STARS? Ans: Stars organizational structure and practices show that IS department is not given the proper attention that it requires, as the nature of the business dictates that IS should be taken as a the most significant part of their organization as all the basic functions of Stars rely on IS department, information and information system in itself regarding to the business nature can be critical to the business customer which is patient, so a department with such importance needs to be revamped fundamentally so that it can perform to its optimum level. Improving it would not only ease the whole organization of its cluttered work but also would make operations much smoother and easy for the employees of other departments as well, IT department needs to be re-organized so that the know their job and responsibility and they should be the deciders along with IS department that what equipment, systems and application to be bought and developed to work in organization so that all the systems and application in the organization are synchronized and can work inter departmental, information sharing between the departments can be synchronized and that all the departments are on the same platform and that there are no issues compatibility in the organization. The role of Information services and Information technology needs to be well defined and everyone should not be able to barge in on the department and ask what they want or tell them to implement things rather they should develop a plan how systems needs to be integrated in organization, which applications departments are going to be using so that not only costs can be saved, all the employees can be aware of the systems and information sharing becomes easy and accessible to everyone. IS and IT departments should be able to decide what new technology or infrastructure they need and they should be able to maintain and use it in house and taking care of its security as well, ad hoc basis for the security and applications development as well as equipment repairs shall be terminated and proper in house capabilities should be present to deal with such issues, not only this will help them reduce costs and avoid ridiculous amounts they have to pay to consultant, but they will also have well defined roles, people from IS and IT departments will know what their job is and what they have to provide to other departments and they should become a support system for all the other departments and bring about a
uniformity in the usage of systems, information and software around the organization. Q3: what steps should Khan take to strengthen the ability of the information systems group to perform better? Ans: Khan should take steps to first make Information systems department re-organized and create a hierarchy of the IS group so that each person should be able to identify his job and position in the group and what his responsibilities are. Secondly steps should be taken to reduce involvement of other departments from the organization to dictating the IS group and bringing different requests from time to time and creating their own applications and systems instead Khan should make the IS department take charge of such things and they should be the ones developing and providing key information solutions, applications and systems that shall be running all across the organization, they shall act as unifying group for the whole organization and as considering the nature of the business, information is very fundamental and key driver of their business model, so IS should be the most important department of organization and Khan should be able to communicate such importance to directors and CEO. Define IT and IS as playing a pivotal role in the organization of business, providing key operational solutions to the departments and increasing their services performance. Due to all such factors efficiency will become a byproduct and it will help in reducing costs and better managing their budget. Additionally Khan should give confidence and support to the IS group and listen to their needs which are essential to be fulfilled but in return he should make sure that IS group does groom themselves and take charge as being the most important department of organization and deliver what they are supposed to.
