Hi Alex,
Here is the information that you requested:
Reference to the book:
Title - Information Systems: Foundation of E-Business
Edition - 4th Edition
Author - Steven Alter
ISBN - 0130617733
Case Study Summaries:
Note: Due to copyright laws I cannot copy out the exact text, so the
summaries are paraphrased. However, most of these cases have been
taken from other sources such as newspapers and periodicals and can
all be located by citation in the back of the book (Notes section).
CASE #1: Hershey Foods (Alter, pg 39)
This case essentially explains the problems that Hershey Foods
experienced when it attempted to go live with an all-encompassing
$112M information system. The system was budgeted for completion in 3
years, but in the third year development/testing were still not
complete; this resulted in the inability to distribute goods to
suppliers and distributors during Halloween season. Predicted sales
losses were estimated at $150M for that year.
CASE #2: London Ambulance Service (Alter, pg 548)
The ambulance service originally segmented the area into three
sections, but felt that a system that could treat all of London as a
single zone would be more effective. The newly developed system was
not fully tested or debugged when it was first deployed - callers
could not get through to the system, dispatching centers were swamped
with computer exception messages, and several people died as a result
of ambulances arriving up to 3 hours late.
CASE #3: Patient's Bill of Rights Act 1998 (Alter, pg 175)
This case describes a debate between patients and HMOs where patients
demanded the best attention and facility, but reducing medical costs
was a key issue for anyone paying medical insurance premiums. The bill
proposed the collection of standardized medical record data for ALL
patients (an all-encompassing information system): this was intended
to support the choice of the patient regarding physician, but would
actually have the opposite effect. "The plans with the least choice
for patients are HMOs that permit only member physicians"...therefore
patients would rarely get the desired physician.
CASE #4: Owens Corning: Integrating Across Business Units (Alter, pg.
222)
This case describes a company that was quickly losing market share to
competitors and had shrinking revenues. It had 200 incompatible
information systems across all their business units. They decided that
to remain competitive, one task that needed to be undertaken was to
develop a single IS for the entire company to replace the old systems.
They embarked on a two-year rush project which eventually took over 3
years with project cost over $110M. "The project team and local
business operations sometimes had to be satisfied with 'good enough
engineering' rather than insisting on the best way to perform each
process."
I hope these were the types of cases you were looking for...the book
is definitely a worthy resource for such types of cases. Feel free to
post a clarification if any of the information here is unclear.
Cheers,
answerguru-ga |
