5.4 – Exercise

These Exercises provide you with the opportunity to apply concepts and ideas that have been presented in the text and discussion so far. They also provide you the chance to continue to look for the missing links – the needs we’ve not identified yet, or the implications of choices you’ve just made that we’ve not thought of before. In most cases, you’ll need to use an example to illustrate your reasoning; this should be a real-world example, drawn either from your own personal and professional experiences, or from events reported on in the news or professional literature.

Strong Hint: You may need to go beyond the textbook, and do some additional inquiry & research on the Web, to make a meaningful and complete answer to these questions. As you do, be sure to cite your sources in your submitted answers!

For these exercises, assume that you’re helping to plan a BYOD migration for Silver Wings Escapes, a medium-sized charter air services operator. From ticketing and reservations, through flight crews and maintainers, nearly everyone in the company probably has some good reason to be using a phablet, smart phone or other “personal” information tools in the course of their work. And then of course there’s the passengers to consider…

What are the key reasons that you would want management to set up a performance measurement and management system for this BYOD migration? After all, getting the BYOD system features installed and operating is a major project in itself – now you want to add another project-within-a-project on top of that! How do you justify this to management?

Your boss is already concerned about keeping everything safe and secure; but she does not understand the relationship (if any) between performance measurement, KPIs, benchmarks, and all of that “stuff,” and the needs to keep everybody’s information, applications, etc., safe, secure, private where they need to be, shared where they need to be, and so on. How do you explain how these fit together.

The next “bright idea” that comes up is adding passenger WiFi and Internet services to your company’s aircraft. One of your coworkers just came back from a trade show and is passing around brochures from Duncan Aviation, including their equipment, data rates and costs fact sheet (Links to an external site.). Sales and marketing thinks this is a great idea – “seamless” passenger access both to the customer, for Ticketing & Reservations (T&R), flight scheduling updates, etc. and for the customer/passenger to be able to stay plugged into the rest of their life’s information webs. The aircraft avionics engineers will work their specific technical details, but as the MIS systems team lead, you think there are some key questions to consider before they start buying equipment. What issues should be identified and addressed, before the company commits to this next major systems migration?