Case Study 5u6c23

JetBlue and the Veterans istration: The Critical Importance of IT Processes

Case Study Questions

1. Eric Brinker of JetBlue noted that the database developed during the crisis had not been needed before because the company had never experienced a meltdown. What are the risks and benefits associated with this approach to IT planning? Provide some examples of each. The database system that developed during the crisis has now been implemented at JetBlue airways, but there are certain risks and benefits associated with this approach to the IT Planning. Risks: a) Inability of the employees and IT Staff to discern if there would be a system failure that may happen, as a result to failure in the fixation and continuation of the systems operations. Another disadvantage that may occur is the low volume of customers who will patronize the services offered by JetBlue resulting to decreasing market share. b) Additional allocation of money to compensate for the new system and its maintenance implemented by JetBlue was expensive. c) Not all the staff are educational or experienced enough how to use the system, as a result greater probability that failure may occur. As for example: On February 2007, after an ice storm, JetBlue Airways was forced to cancel more than 1,000 flights, on that very day, JetBlue doesn’t have enough of its home-office employees or crew that was trained enough for their reservation system. If they were unable to resolve that problem using their system there might be a possibility that there business process and operations will take certain circumstances.

Benefits: a) Better communication between JetBlue and the customers arises through the use of the database system. Since then, the customers are able to take auto,

mated flights which was addressed to them through e-mail and mobile devices. As a result of this implementation of the database system, increase in competence and marketability was established. b) Staff and employees are able to do the multi-tasking, additionally, there was an increase in efficiency and increase in productivity resulting to gain of profit. c) Better flow of communication and information through the and staff of JetBlue. They have now the capability to discern certain situations happening from time to time. 2. With hindsight, we now know that the decision made by Eric Raffin of the VA not to fail over to the Denver site was the correct one. However, it involved failing to follow established backup procedures. With the information he had at the time, what other alternatives could he have considered? Develop at least two of them.

Eric Raffin made the decision not to fail over to the Denver site to avoid further risk Denver site could be incurred. But, if the problem is software-related, fail over from Sacramento VA medical facility to Denver VA medical facility he could lost the remaining 11 sites in the Denver environment.

1st Alternative: Reforming the IT organization at VA Medical Facility from local processing to regional data-processing centres. From the case, we know that VA owned an IT service, has personal budget authority, and its own staff, additionally it has its own autonomy on how its infrastructure evolved.

Decisions with related to IT are generated between the local IT Leadership officials and the director of VA Medical Facility. This kind of program made a necessary adjustment across sites to be closely impossible to undertake, to counteract this situation they need to make a data- processing centre so that information’s and certain data needed will be centralized.

2nd Alternative: Provide a centralized data storage infrastructure for IT Consultancy and other IT Services. By this, the capability to conclude for possible solutions whenever failure come up will be easy.

3. A small, undocumented change resulted in the collapse of the VA system, largely because of the high interrelationship between its applications. What is the positive side of this high degree of interconnection, and how does this benefit patients? Provide examples from the case to justify your answer.

VA uses two application on their daily operations, the first one is VISTA which stands for Veteran Health Information System and Technology Architecture which maintains electronic health records. The other application is RS which stands for Computerized Patient Record System, is a collection of clinical applications that provides an across-the board-view of each veteran’s health record. To access RS, the needs VISTA applications, with these two combination doctors and nurses able to pull up patient health records. From studying the record doctors could increase the accuracy of his diagnosis for the patient. From the case, we know beside the accuracy of diagnosis, interrelationship of the systems gives the other advantages that it enables the to have a real-time order checking, notification system to alert clinicians of significant events, and a clinical reminder system.