Information System Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words - 1

Information System - Essay Example In spite of maintaining a high performance on the business parameters, Comair was simply grounded for a full 3 days during the peak holiday season because it faced a highly damaging IT risk issue on December 24, 2004, when the company’s Information system for managing the scheduling of the crew and flights crashed. It is impossible for an airline to fly when its mission critical crew scheduling system fails. In case of Comair, this IT failure resulted in a loss of approx $20 million which was actually wiping out it previous quarter earning of $25.7 million. This report is a study in the Comair Information systems and highlights the gaps between the IT strategy and business strategy. The report also attempts to suggest an information system which can take care of the gaps between business and IT strategy so that such failures as mentioned above are prevented as much as possible as well as identifies the people, technology and organization issues which Comair must take into account before building a resilient information system. Comair information system was purchased from SBS international in the year 1986 after union and federal regulations forced Comair to meet higher standards in its management procedures. To comply with the regulations, Comair leased software from SBS International to track & schedule its flight crews. The system worked admirably and was a welcome relief for the staff who were managing the schedule using the pen & paper until then. As the business started growing, Comair felt a need to upgrade its information system as the existing system was written in FORTRAN for which there was no in-house expertise available. Moreover it was the only system using old IBM AIX platform compared to current HP UNIX. Following table lists down the milestones in Comair’s IT journey until Dec 24, 2004 against their business strategy. As can be clearly seen from the comparative