JetBlue and WestJet: A Tale of Two IS Projects - Case Study Example

This has been effective and reliable for customers. To airline companies, such reservations have been a burden, they heavily require extended management of inventory systems; all flight information is stored in records. Such systems are also a communication platform between the airline and the customer. Therefore, airline reservation systems have a large impact on the company’s operational activities, and in decision making to airline companies. It is through such airline reservations that the company can effectively communicate with its customers and ensure the customer books and pays for tickets in the most convenient and reliable way without unnecessary delays or surprises.

On the other hand, such systems are critical in decision making. Accounts with other airlines are easily maintained as well facilitating more efficient and effective communication with other departments. The company is also able to deliver fast and reliable services to the customer. It is through such reservation systems that the company can best decide which routes are more profitable to capitalize on, improve their services on particular routes based on customer dynamics, among other strategic decisions to ensure competitiveness.

The company is also able to determine how they perform in the market, and any changes in customer bookings taken into account and investigated to determine the necessary action. Upgrading the information systems in the two companies involved many risks and risk factors that threatened the operations of the companies. First, WestJet had a massive data of about 840,000 reservations to convert in the new system, which implies that such large amount of data when hand processed would lead to a complex process where chances of errors, and omissions were high and real.

In addition, the company risked losing customer’s confidence in cancelling some flights to allow the conversion of the data and normalization of the new system. Loss of customers could mean loss of business to the company. The fact that the company did not announce the system switch until the last day would imply that the company had no enough time to pilot run the system and were switching over abruptly, which is a big risk incase such system fails to work as required, crashes, or leads to loss of important data.

Besides loosing customers, the company was at a great risk to effect its operations after the system failure. On the other and, though JetBlue had a better approach, there was still a risk of the backup system deployed failing to operate as required, or leading to loss of data. The hiring of more than500 temporary agents risked the business operations as some could have leaked the company’s secrets to its rivals, while such temporally servers were not experienced; their operations could not be guaranteed to be over board, implying loss of clients when dissatisfied with service offered by such clients.

The company also faced a risk of system breakdown as the new system was also abruptly installed over a short time, which could poses doubts on the effectiveness of such hurried execution of system installation. Once WestJet switched on its new system, its entire website crashed, with its call center being seriously overwhelmed with calls. This was a disaster to the company,