Question

Read the case study carefully before answering the below three questions.

Case Study: The marketing manager of an airline company is looking at travel habits of business travelers. She noticed that business travelers tend to book just few days before flying, unlike economy who book far in advance. In fact, some business travelers may book as late as few minutes before flying. She wants a decision support system based on past bookings that can predict how many business class bookings are likely to happen as these are hard to guess. The idea here is that any leftover bookings could be sold cheaper on the day as ‘upgrades’ for economy customers. This could increase the profits of each flight by 20%. This kind of system is a unique system with an innovative idea that can’t be found in the market. Moreover, the implementation of such system will give the airline company a major advantage against many of its competitors. The marketing manager does not want to share this information with any other business, so she suggests that the system be built by the airline’s information technology department even if they need to employ few more IT people to help them to finish the work on time. She tells the board meeting “We do not have too much time; we need to install this system before summer season starts in five months’ time.”

Consider the above case while answering the following questions:

1. What type of sourcing would you recommend the company to adopt? Why would you recommend this type? (30 points)

2. What kind of system development method/ approach would you recommend the company to follow? Why would you recommend this method/ approach? (30 points)

3. List four advantages and four disadvantages of sourcing information system as recommended in question 1? (40 points)

Answer 1

As the company does not want to disclose tehir idea of the business to outshine its competitors so the sorucing of the project will be in-house beacuse it will keep the idea confidential and other business will not be able to get hold of it or would not know about it. Company can make use of its internal imformation system as it will be having the imformation about the recent flight booking behaviour to determine the usage pattern and they need to implement to software that will be using that data to show recommendation to the user for discount.

As here , the requirement are predetermined so the use of traditional system development methodology will be the best suitable for this type of project because it include all the step from design to implemenation , from testing to maintenance.

Advantage:

The idea will be kept confidential

No leak of data.

All required data in available

In-house sorucing will help in keeping quality check on project.

Disadvantage:

in-house employee does not have pressure of work on them so project may take time

in-house system may be not of superior quality.

functionality or feature may not be tested to atmost quality.

employee might lack the knowledge required for project.