AF302 – INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Assignment 2: Face to Face & Blended Mode

Semester 1, 2020

Weighting: This assignment is marked out of 20 marks and is worth 15% of your coursework.
For this assignment, you have to write answers in point form.

Due Date: Week 12, 24th May, Sunday 11.55pm [Fiji Time]
 Face to Face Mode
o Online submission in Assignment 2 (Individual) Drop In Box for FACE TO
FACE Students.

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 Blended Mode

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o Please submit your assignment in Assignment 2 (Individual) Drop In Box for

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BLENDED MODE Students

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NOTE: Any assignment submitted online after this time will be regarded as LATE
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ASSIGNMENT and will incur penalty of 10% per day.

Assignment Details
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1. This is an Individual assignment.

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2. ALL QUESTIONS ARE COMPULSORY.

3. Answers should be written in point form using font type Times New Roman, size 11 or
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12 font, with 1.15 line spacing. No word limit applies.

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4. Objective of Assessment Task;

 Develop critical and analytical skills relating to the topic areas addressed in the
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course.
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5. Assessment Guidelines;

 In preparing for this assignment please note the following instructions.

 Students may either paraphrase or quote from the appropriate sources, please use
proper ‘in-text’ referencing i.e. Author, Date e.g. (Patel, 2020).

 Bibliography must be generated using APA referencing style listing ALL your
reference sources. (Check pdf document on moodle for APA writing Style)

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  Student need to pick appropriate sources for example, book chapter, journal articles,
official publication, etc.) that you will use as examples. (Note: Wikipedia or
Investopedia is not a trusted site to be used as reference).

 Check your assignment for possible plagiarism. Upload your draft assignment using
your respective Assignment Dropbox located under the assignment block of AF302
Moodle Page. Use the plagiarism report provided by Turn-It-In to make necessary
changes to your assignment. The final version of your assignment must have a
Similarity Index of less than or equal to 20%. When checking your assignment for
plagiarism, you can exclude the following: quotes, bibliography and common word
matches of 100.
Note: You may need to upload your assignment a number of times and check for the Similarity
Index. Once you receive the plagiarism report and have to make changes, delete the previous

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assignment draft before uploading draft before uploading the modified version. Remember to

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revise the name for example AF302_Assign2_SXXXXXXXX_Draft 1. Keep on uploading and

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modifying before the due date until you are able to achieve an Index of less than or equal to 20%.
Do not click on the SEND FOR MARKING button unless you are sure that it’s your final version.

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ALL ASSIGNMENTS SUBMITTED ONLINE MUST BE IN WORD FORMAT (PDF
FORMAT WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED OR MARKED)
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 Marks will be deducted if your Similarity Index exceeds 20%. The following table
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details the penalties if the Similarity Index value exceeds a certain value/percentage.
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Value of Similarity Index Deduction

0 to 20% No deduction
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21 to 40% 15% of scored mark deducted from total

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41 to 49% 30% of scored mark deducted from total

Above and including 50% Assignment will be returned unmarked
and student gets a grade of zero for the
assignment
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 The final soft copy of your assignment should be saved as:

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AF302_Assign2_SXXXXXXXX_Final. Click on the SEND FOR MARKING

button to ensure that your final version is submitted.

 Students have been given more than sufficient time to complete this assignment;
therefore, late submission will have penalty of 10% deduction per day.

 Softcopy
 Face to Face Students and Blended Mode Students
o Softcopy upload should include the Student ID number and name in the
Header of the pages. NO COVER PAGE REQUIRED.

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  Layout;
1. Answer to Part A – Critical Thinking Questions
2. Answer to Part B – Case Study Questions
3. References

NOTE: Should you need clarifications while doing this assignment, you may post your
query under the Assignment 2 Help! Forum (in the Assignment block) located on the AF302
moodle page. Students are advised to read through responses for postings made by other
students before posting their own to avoid repetition of queries.

~Best of Luck~

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Part A: Critical Thinking Questions (10 marks)
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1. Imagine that a national chain of grocery stores regularly administers customer satisfaction
surveys and analyzes the results to evaluate the performance of individual store locations.
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Briefly give an examples or descriptions of the data, information, and knowledge that would
result from these surveys. (6 marks)
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2. Why are internal threats a major challenge for organizations? How can internal threats be
minimized? . (4 marks)
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 Part B: Case Study (10 marks)
Continental Airlines Flies High with Its Real-Time Data Warehouse

As business intelligence (BI) becomes a critical component of daily operations, real-time data
warehouses that provide end users with rapid updates and alerts generated from transactional
systems are increasingly being deployed. Real-time data warehousing and BI, supporting its
aggressive Go Forward business plan, have helped Continental Airlines alter its industry status
from “worst to first” and then from “first to favourite.” Continental airlines (now part of United
Airlines) is a leader in real-time DW and BI. In 2004, Continental won the Data Warehousing
Institute’s Best Practices and Leadership Award. Even though it has been a while since Continental
Airlines deployed its hugely successful real-time DW and BI infrastructure, it is still regarded as
one of the best examples and a seminal success story for real-time active data warehousing.

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Continental Airlines was founded in 1934, with a single engine Lockheed aircraft in the South

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western United States. As of 2006, Continental was the fifth largest airline in the United States

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and the seventh largest in the world. Continental had the broadest global route network of any U.S.

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airline, with more than 2,300 daily departures to more than 227 destinations.
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Back in 1994, Continental was in deep financial trouble. It had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection twice and was heading for its third, and probably final, bankruptcy. Ticket sales were
hurting because performance on factors that are important to customers was dismal, including a
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low percentage of on-time departures, frequent baggage arrival problems and too many customers
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turned away due to overbooking.

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The revival of Continental began in 1994, when Gordon Bethune became CEO and initiated the
Go Forward plan, which consisted of four interrelated parts to be implemented simultaneously.
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Bethune targeted the need to improve customer-valued performance measures by better

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understanding customer needs as well as customer perceptions of the value of services that were
and could be offered. Financial management practices were also targeted for a significant overhaul.
As early as 1998, the airline had separate databases for marketing and operations, all hosted and
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managed by outside vendors. Processing queries and instigating marketing programs to its high-
value customers were time-consuming and ineffective. In additional, information that the
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workforce needed to make quick decisions was simply not available. In 1999, Continental chose
to integrate its marketing, IT, revenue, and operational data sources into a single, in-house, EDW.
The data warehouse provided a variety of early, major benefits.

As soon as Continental returned to profitability and ranked first in the airline industry in many
performance metrics, Bethune and his management team raised the bar by escalating the vision.
Instead of just performing best, they wanted Continental to be their customer’s favorite airline.
The Go Forward plan established more actionable ways to move from first to favourite among
customers. Technology became increasingly critical for supporting these new initiatives. In the
early days, having access to historical, integrated information was sufficient. This produced

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 substantial strategic value. But it became increasingly imperative for the data warehouse to provide
real-time, actionable information to support enterprise-wide tactical decision making and business
processes.

Luckily, the warehouse team had expected and arranged for the real-time shift. From the very
beginning, the team had created an architecture to handle real-time data feeds into the warehouse,
extracts of data from legacy systems into the warehouse, and tactical queries to the warehouse that
required almost immediate response times. In 2001, real-time data became available from the
warehouse, and the amount stored grew rapidly. Continental moves real-time data (ranging from
to-the –minute to hourly) about customers, reservations, check-ins, operations, and flights from its
main operational systems to the warehouse. Continental’s real-time applications include the
following:

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 Revenue management| Customer relationship management (CRM)| Crew operations and

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payroll, Security and fraud, Flight operations.

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In the first year alone, after the data warehouse project was deployed, Continental identified and

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eliminated over $7 million in fraud and reduced costs by $41 million. With a $30 million
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investment in hardware and software over 6 years, Continental has reached over $500 million in
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increased revenues and cost savings in marketing, fraud detection, demand forecasting and
tracking, and improved data centre management. The single, integrated, trusted view of the
business (i.e., the single version of the truth) has led to better, faster decision making.
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Because of its tremendous success, Continental’s DW implementation has been recognised as an

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excellent example for real-time BI, based on its scalable and extensible architecture, practical
decisions on what data are captured in real time, strong relationships with end users, a small and
highly competent data warehouse staff, sensible weighing of strategic and tactical decision support
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requirements, understanding of the synergies between decision support and operations, and
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changed business processes that use real-time data.

Questions
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1. Describe the four benefits of Data Warehousing. (4 marks)

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2. Explain the importance of an area-time data warehouse to an airline company. (3 marks)

3. Describe three (3) strategic advantages Continental can derive from the real-time system
as opposed to a traditional information system? (3 marks)

Note: All answers for Part A and Part B is to be written in POINT FORM. (NO
PARAGRAPH WRITING)

THE END
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