Outrigger Hotels and Resort Case

Introduction

The Outrigger Hotels and Resorts case describes a medium corporation that provides leisure and tours to the South Pacific and the Hawaiian Island. The firm has over 3600 workers and its assets are estimated to be worth $1.4 billion. The hospitality firm generates over $45 million yearly. Outrigger Hotels and Resorts employs the use of information technology in activities. This case illustrates the strategy, history and present information system infrastructure of Outrigger Hotels and Resort. The company has implemented an extensive information system in its operations and thus it has to have an effective information system plan. This paper will assess the strategy that should be applied by Outrigger and its present utilization of information system technologies. Therefore, Outrigger Hotels and Resort must have an effective information system architecture, vision and a strategic information system plan. This report is designed to use the case in developing significant background information required to successfully engage in developing an effective information system resources and how they can be efficiently used by the company in its operations.

Analysis and Findings

Presently, the organization’s state of information system operations can be classified into several categories which include the applications, software, management of data and staff organization. The case illustrates that there is complete redundancy in the firm’s software and updating the software us essential to match the modern information system business trends. The software has to be up to date to allow the hotel’s customers and employees to make reservations at any time. Outrigger’s present operating system that links every business activity in the hotel ranging from accounting to telephone switches is Stellex 2.0. However., the firm made significant steps in acquiring the enterprise resource planning program which is an effective information system tool for modern agencies. Before the purchase of the ERP system, Outrigger Hotels and Resort was disciplined in the manner in which the management collected data through the Stellex program. The system helped the firm in requesting codes, standardization, and in identifying and naming conventions to develop essential reports. Data was extracted daily by scrubbing programs and transferring the information to Epiphany for evaluation and the ERP system for purposes of record keeping and accounting.

Outrigger’s hardware support is always contracted to the local suppliers. The company’s operations personnel are answerable to the property technology group which is managed by Alan White. The success of the firm’s information technology department can be measured using the traditional metrics such as budgeting and timeliness. The firm introduced service level contracts that offered choices to user managers hence enhancing accountability and better outline expectations. The senior management of Outrigger corporation is aiming to negotiate with third party shareholders and large consumer brands. However, the firm has external threats and online competitors such as TripAdvisor and Expedia that are threatening the capacity of the firm to entirely provide information using human travel agencies.

Organizations have to go through four significant steps to implement a hack free enterprise risk management system. The measures adopted include the reaction, anticipation, and collaboration as well as the orchestration stage. In the reacting stage, the company will encounter compliance and risk exposure to which it will be required to comply and react. The anticipating step requires the firm to automate and link some processes to improve efficiency and reduce redundancies when implementing enterprise risk management. The organization then goes through the collaborating stage by setting imperatives for ERM implementation and adopting technology that links the various implementation systems. The final process is the orchestrating step that involves aligning the entire organization to its goals and ensuring the implementation process is complementary and consistent.

The development of technology has continued to risk information resources owned by companies and individuals such as company employees. Therefore, it is essential to safeguard the company’s data from third parties such as competitors from the ever-increasing hacking threat. Hacking describes a situation where the hacking parties establish secret and indirect versions of software and hardware to prevent access and control of several functions of a machine. The most common types of hacking include open source and software hacks. These types of hacking affect the update selection of firmware as well as several other devices for installation and self-running. Hackers utilize numerous tools to get important information from companies. The first tool is the denial-of-service attacks which is designed to prevent the right users of the company from accessing web sites and networks. The hackers develop various programs that constantly ask for information from the target network reaching a point where the network is unresponsive to any other service request. Hackers also operate mechanized programs and scripts that prevent a network from being stable forcing it to shut down. Another tool used by hackers is referred to as social engineering which is used to trick and influence unsuspecting victims to provide information concerning a specific network. Hackers may prevent to be employees of a company that forgot some password when seeking information on a network. The other tool used by hackers includes the web page defacements. Web pages are computer files that are stored on a server computer in form of registers. The hackers alter the web page by accessing these files and then replacing them with other files hence altering some functions of a webpage.

The three major methods that should be used to prevent hacking are installation of firewalls, using anti-spy software and the use of anti-virus software (Ewers, 2017). Firewalls prevent unauthorized access to information and prevent communication from unauthorized sources. Antivirus software on the other hand safeguards computers from the risk of software which can destroy and crash data. Also, it prevents spammers from sending an email to other accounts protecting the computer from incoming viruses by automatically deleting them. Spyware software are installed in a network without one’s consent and are used to monitor an individual’s actions when using the web. They record everything that the user types from financial information to passwords. Therefore, installing anti-spyware maintains and protects the company and employees against such exploits.

Discussion

In this case, Outrigger Company has to centralize its shared services and operations to avoid redundancy as well as to achieve a common global business system in human resources, finances as well as supply chain management for every firm operating locally. The implementation of a single customer relationship management would enhance the simplicity and speed of work at which work is conducted. A common platform using CRM will ensure that the firm would have to leverage a significant purchasing power which would potentially increase by managing its relations with its service as well as material suppliers from a common entity (Laudon & Laudon, 2015). Thus, the company expenditure could be managed centrally as its suppliers will only work with a single purchase rather than several and this would work to the advantage of the company because it would facilitate the firm’s success in addressing the different issues that faced it.

Outrigger had to make sure that its plan of implementing the Customer relationship management Information system was effective for the success of its new transformation and thus the project was provided sufficient time and resources. The company applied the strategy of ensuring that it dealt independently with each company operating locally and this was a significant success to its plan. The first step the company took was ensuring that they had adequate resource for completing this project (Laudon & Laudon, 2015). The firm then proceeded to measure the willingness and desire of its local enterprises to embrace this change by evaluating the complexity as well as the number of the legacy systems of every unit and the skills of each local project team. These were essential factors in formulating the customized operations which served to meet the requirements and needs of each operating firm hence playing a significant role in making the implementation plan successful.

The Outrigger Company had significant benefits after integrating the CRM into its information system. This is because the company was able to facilitate significant development and growth which resulted to the success of the firm and its development into one of the biggest mobile service providers in the globe. Achievement of the firm’s objectives which was to centralize its functions was facilitated by the implementation of the Customer relationship management Information system (Laudon & Laudon, 2015). This is because business operations such as procurement were significantly transformed. The firm was also able to develop a centralized procurement system which was more effective after implementing the CRM system. Eventually all the firms that were affiliated to Outrigger were able to be more uniform in their operations because of the common service models which led to the significant success of Outrigger.

According to Fraser & Simkins (2016), two measures are used to describe a time-driven enterprise risk management system. These measures include the cost used in supplying an individual capacity of resources as well as the amount of consumption of the particular resource capacity through the various functional activities and operations performed by the funds. By employing the use of this knowledge, a time-driven enterprise risk management system can be applied at any multinational corporation. This system can be implemented by determining the various categories of services that are provided by the company. The company can then identify specific risks related to that particular service based on multiple factors such as type of service, the completion time, as well as the complexity of the service. To prevent hacking and unauthorized access to the company information cloud computing services from reputable online companies such as Microsoft Azure should be used. Microsoft is focused on providing hybrid cloud networks enabling customers to use on-premise hardware. Customers are also able to store their data to the cloud. Microsoft Azure offers privacy and security as its priority. Therefore, it is developed with tolls that help clients to detect suspicious devices and threats in real-time. Like Amazon, Microsoft Azure offers IaaS services. However, Azure offers more resources of platform-as-a-service compared to AWS (Kotas, Naughton, & Imam, 2018). Azure supports a wide range of programming tools and languages that are used by developers. It also has automation features which help the user to automate repetitive tasks in the network. However, compared to AWS, Azure offers little automatic management and thus its customers have to manually manage their data (Karthikeyan, 2017). Therefore, someone needs to operate Azure directly to ensure proper maintenance of data. The advantage of Azure over Amazon Web Service is that most of its services are derived from the other Microsoft products making it easy for organizations using Windows Operating systems to integrate Azure to the system.

Enterprise risk management is an innovative system that can be used to break down a company’s risk overheads more conveniently and improve service delivery. It can also help in making better pricing and product decisions. The enterprise risk management system model works best in limited settings where it was initially implemented (Gatzert, & Martin, 2015). This is fundamentally a single location, the plant of a company or a single department. However, problems are experienced with the model when it is implemented on a large scale. Therefore, it can prove to be more expensive for a company to be able to be managed and maintained successfully (Cohen, Krishnamoorthy, & Wright, 2017). This is because the enterprise risk management system model requires time as well as cost requirements in developing and maintaining the model, and this is a significant barrier to large scale implementation. Routine updating of the systems in the model can be minimized due to the costs that are involved in resurveying and re-interviewing, and this can contribute to making the estimates of the various costs of products, customers and processes to be inaccurate.

Implementing an enterprise risk management system in an enterprise can assist the organization to get a better understanding on where the profitability as well as cost pricing aspect of the organization which can help in further expanding the business through cutting on some services and streamlining on the process of utilizing resources (Grace et al. 2015). This model will also assist the organization in making better considerations when providing promotional services to the customers to keep a large customer base that is loyal to the company. Similarly, human resource department through the enterprise risk management system can be able to supervise and evaluate the performance of its employees in the company and make enhanced decisions if it can add more skilled personnel to the staff or reduce the workforce and assign every employee to the appropriate assignment that they do best (Bromiley, Rau & McShane, 2016).

There are a lot of companies offering similar services as the firm using this system as well as small competitors and therefore the company uses the enterprise risk management system model to achieve its mission of being the best e-service provider in the world by maintaining value to the customer to ensure that customers are satisfied when purchasing their services (Bromiley et al. 2015). The model helps the company to ensure that its pricing decision remains competitive with the open competition and that it offers more value to the customer at the same price to be able to maintain a significant market share.

The model offers the essential information that is needed by the company to understand the value of incremental costs of new offerings and know if they exceed the expense estimates of the company. This will help the company to make better decisions if they can continue or abandon new ideas before committing to implement them.

Conclusion

Information system projects do not often work out as planned due to several reasons. Some of the main reasons include money, time as well as change requests. Most times the budget is usually dictated by the management of a firm and it is always not adequate to meet the required expectations as planned by the organization. There is a need for more assets to make sure that the project is successful and this could prioritize the project over the intended budget.

Another key factor for consideration is time. When dealing with the organization internal teams, the project manager has to recognize that every team member has responsibilities within the firm apart from the project. Often times this takes precedence. Change requests could also have a significant influence on the project success and this is the reason why the project requirements have to be detailed in the start of a project in order for the change requests could be minimal.

Recommendations

Outrigger Hotels need to put some ideas and some recommendations that will see it command a better share and a better scale of success in its distribution window. One of the core issues needed in this case, which will change the business’s scope and its general success, is the use of modern marketing methods. Marketing goes hand in hand with the stipulated distribution channel that the business has identified. Marketing is one of the concepts that will change the operational scope of Outrigger Hotels. Outrigger Hotels is newly established, and hence the best way it can hit and create an impact on the market is through the use of a well-defined marketing method (Kotler et al. 2017, p. 67). Digital marketing is, therefore, one of the methods that need to be implemented here. It is one of the methods that can help introduce the business to the competitive market and hence create a tangible way of sustaining itself in the market.

The other recommendation that needs to be put in place is the massive usage of direct distribution channels. A direct-distribution channel is a method that can work best in this case. Outrigger Hotels is still exerting itself in the competitive market. Therefore, there is a need for a method that can work best for the business and the customers at large. The direct channel of distribution creates a personalized way of entering the market. It creates a more poignant way of having direct contact and direct impact with your customers. Therefore, this method’s use is mostly anticipatory here and can be used to meet the needs of the market and create a more successful way, creating an impact on the customers. It is one of the methods that should be largely applied here. Even more significant, dress and appearance policies in the hospitality industry must ban extremes in attire such as dirty clothes, attires that are too baggy, too revealing, or too tight (Ruetzler et al., 2012). Additionally, messages that are unpleasant or unfriendly to any protected group (for instance race, sex, or national origin), or unlawful, or offensive must also be banned. If all dress and appearance policies in the hospitality industry are framed this way, the whole industry stands to reap massive rewards from them. In hotels and restaurants businesses, these policies play a huge role in dictating employee dress and appearance. Consequently, the implementation of such guidelines has led to varied but significant benefits in the hospitality industry at large.

The enterprise risk management system is imperative in most company operations as it assesses the effects of risks in their operations. The other important aspect that was considered in the successful implementation of CRM was reviewing the local trends in the system roll out process of the company. It was essential that the firm significantly considered the various occurrences in different countries because this had a direct impact on the employees and how they perceived the changes made. However, this process could have been made to be more effective if every individual stakeholder was comprehensively involved. In my opinion, the junior employees of the company felt that they were left out particularly at the local companies and this led to friction to change. This could have been avoided if the employees participated and were involved on formulating the company strategy and changes.

References

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