Solving Problems: Disconnect Between Departments
Uploaded by drinksbeer on Jan 06, 2005
Management Problem: Northwest Insurance
Background
Northwest Insurance is a major regional company which has four autonomous divisions that handle life insurance, automobile insurance, homeowner's and renter's insurance, and retirement planning.
Although their information system department is large, it is overworked. Employees of Northwest Insurance found out advantages of using computers and now requested more computers and software development from IS. The budget of information system departure allowed to buy only 30% of requested computers each year for the last three years and only 50% the two years before that. However it takes about siw months for work to even start on a software request.
Because of dissatisfaction of information system department, divisions started independently providing their own PC support. They buy it from their own budgets and have pulled employees with computer knowledge from their jobs to support their coworkers computing needs.
Problems
1. As each division has bought their own computers the problems with hardware appeared. Because the computers purchased by divisions are not Northwest Insurance standard computers, information system department refused to fixed these problems. They did not use knowledge of specialist from information system departure therefore happened that the computers are not compatible.
2. In each division, now 80% of employees have their own computer on their desks. Individual users also develop some database applications and tracking programs. The applications available on the network are E-Mail and access to the central mainframe. However, they copied data from one computer to another and the data configurations are not compatible. Many of the created programs by employees by their own have minor irritating errors.
3. Because of individual purchase of computers by each divisions and lack of knowledge, Northwest Insurance is unable to benefit from sharing data because there is no connectivity. Employees installed their own programs and they are not connected to the information system department. The IS network has limited capability and two LANs installed by departments in the retirement planning divisions are not connected to the IS network or each other.
4. A large database was recently lost in the automobile insurance division. The employee involved was only person with access to the data and there was no backup.
Solutions
1. Create cooperation between information system department and divisions
- All information system departments has their specialist which could be helpful with purchasing new computers for each division of company.
- Compatibility of the computers with information system department is...