MID-TERM EXAMINATION

Program Name PGP Academic Year/ Term 2021 /Term II

Course Code CIA121201 Course Name Designing and Managing Information
Systems
Total Marks 30 Time 1 hr

Instructions:
Open Book No Open Laptop No Internet Access No Calculator No

Other Information:
A. Attempt all questions.
B. You are free to make assumptions, state it clearly. Assumptions carry marks
C. Participant is needed to answer all questions in each section. Please write to-the point answers. All
answers should be restricted to maximum of 60 words.

Q1. a) Lycra Enterprises is a small firm which provides dry cleaning, dying and [Marks 10]
laundry services. Within a span of two years the firm has gained a
reputation of reliable and dependence service. Still now the firm was
using physical records. Now it decides to do away with manual
processes and implement real-time based information system for their
business. What are your views on the type of information system they
should implement for their firm? Give reasons for your answer.
b) In the beginning, the company was a single store in Seattle’s historic
Pike Place Market. From just a narrow storefront, Starbucks offered
some of the world’s finest fresh-roasted whole bean coffees. The name,
inspired by Moby Dick, evoked the romance of the high seas and the
seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. In 1981, Howard Schultz
(Starbucks chairman, president and chief executive officer) first walked
into a Starbucks store. From his first cup of Sumatra, Howard was drawn
into Starbucks and joined a year later. A year later, in 1983, Howard
travelled to Italy and became captivated by Italian coffee bars and the
romance of the coffee experience. He had a vision to bring the Italian

1
coffeehouse tradition back to the United States. A place for
conversation and a sense of community. A third place between work
and home. He left Starbucks for a short period of time to start his own
Il Giornale coffee houses and returned in August 1987 to purchase
Starbucks with the help of local investors. From the beginning,
Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only
celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling
of connection. Their mission to inspire and nurture the human spirit –
one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time. Today, with
more than 15,000 stores in 50 countries, Starbucks is the premier
roaster and retailer of speciality coffee in the world. And with every
cup, we strive to bring both our heritage and an exceptional experience
to life. Starbucks has certainly invested large amounts of money into
their digital transformation, with their technology and partnership
spending increasing in just the past year from $145 million to an
estimated $250 million. But their efforts have more than paid off, as not
only have their profits soared, but they’ve seen an “unparalleled
frequency” in repeat customers. Starbucks COO Kevin Johnson perhaps
sums it up best: “Where others are attempting to build a mobile app,
Starbucks has built an end-to-end consumer platform anchored around
loyalty.” The company’s main innovation is their Mobile Order and Pay
app. This is fundamentally a customer-first strategy, as it addresses the
basic wants of the consumer: convenience, line avoidance, and so forth.
Coupled with their extensive loyalty program, the app gives Starbucks
the perfect venue to upsell and market to consumers. Furthermore, the
app funnels back massive amounts of user data to the company,
allowing them to better understand their customers’ habits and desires.

Design a management triangle depicting all the three levels of

management for Starbucks. Define two activities for each level (TPS,
MIS, ESS). Define the flow of information in this case.

2
Q2. Punjabi Paratha Corner is a Punjabi restaurant in Guwahati. The restaurant sells [ Marks 20]
all types of ethnic Punjabi cuisine and their “King Punjabi Thali” and “Lassi” are
very famous among customers. The unique taste of the dishes was because of
the cooks who were originally from Punjab. The restaurant also catered to party
orders from weddings, birthday parties or other social get togethers. People
from all places in Guwahati flock to this restaurant to either to eat or takeaway
different varieties of authentic Punjabi cuisines. Realizing the high customer
demand, the management of this business has opened up 5 new outlets in
different parts of Guwahati city. Since their unique selling point was the
authentic Punjabi cuisine taste, so they decided to have a hub-and-spoke model
based kitchen solution, wherein food was cooked at one centralized kitchen and
it would be distributed in 5 outlets where only takeaway service would only be
offered to the customers and no dining experience was available.

Prior to the expansion, the owner was managing the centre, however after
expansion, he hired personnels to manage each of these centres. The earlier
centre has just a printed cash memo system and had no business information
systems in place. Since the growth of centre, the management found it difficult
to manage and predict the suppliers, and bulk orders coming from all the
centres. In additional to it, many of the dishes had a very limited shelf life,
hence the earlier practice was to make just sufficient amount based on gut
feeling and past experiences was becoming less feasible. Since expansion, there
was lot of mismatch of demand and supply, which sometimes resulted in huge
customer dissatisfaction and sometimes it resulted in wastage of cooked food.
Apart from all these operational issues, other issues like pilferage among
workers have also come up. The management has decided to adopt a business
information system for the overall operations. They hired an IT service
company, “NE IT Solutions” to help them in this exercise. Mr Gogoi is working
as a system analyst in “NE IT Solutions” and he has been given the task to do
the entire system analysis and design for Punjabi Paratha Corner. A six months
timeframe has been provided to “NE IT Solutions” for completion of the

3
implementation of the information system. Since, the company has expanded
recently and has put sufficient investments in expansion, they have only a
budget of Rs 30 lakhs for this information system exercise.

Answer the following questions to help Mr Gogoi in this exercise:

a) Provide the problem description for this information system exercise in terms
of problem definition, issues, objectives, requirements, and constraints.
b) Highlight on the technical feasibility of this system development exercise in
terms of inventorying hardware, and comparison of workloads (between
existing system and proposed information system). Assume data as necessary.
c) As an Information System manager, which kinds of information systems
would you suggest to be adopted in this case to smoothen the overall
operations and reduce the cost of operations? Choose appropriate type of
information system for implementation and justify it. Also, consider the cost of
implementing the chosen information system and perform a cost benefit
analysis for the same.
d) The outlets of the Punjabi Paratha Corner are run by semi-literate employees.
How would Mr Gogoi implement an information system exercise with such
employees?
e) Mr Gogoi wants to do an interviewing exercise with different stakeholders in
this organization. He needs help in developing the questions. Can you suggest
few questions that can be incorporated in the questionnaire (suggest any 6
questions). Also suggest the stakeholders whom you think are necessary to be
interviewed in the organization.