This May I introduced a new rapid response solution for Royal Hotel based on the requirement of high standard customer service. My client Royal Hotel wants to better satisfy their valuable customers at a higher level than other “most hotels”. Such as light bulb out and toilet clog should be avoided after making some good change advised by consulting.
I thought the most compliments by customers were caused by a delayed response and disconnection between the housekeeping and the maintenance. Thus, I tried to fix it by purchasing a new IS to solve the problem to allow a rapid response and an effective connection among a few different departments within hotel. However, after the roll-out and implementation, it seems clear that the using of the new system was spotty at best. Most employees did not have the incentive to use it and they thought the old manual system did better for them. Now the most critical issue lies in here: the hotel invested a ton of money to bring in a new system and hope to see more effective outcome from it, however, the resistance of usage did happen. So, there was no improvement resulting from it.
And I as the major consultant people working in this program should take the most responsibility for this issue and try to find a solution to straight it out. Despite I did not stay here for this one and a half month to monitor the whole process of running the new system and had very limited information relating the failure, I figured out the main failure may be disconnection of the four components of information system. Besides technology itself, dropping any one of people, process and structure would harm the results we originally expected.
Technology won’t work unless it can interplay with other components. In addition, technology cannot solve itself and deliver a needed information processing functionality to users if isolated work. I thought in my program “people” and “structure” are the key issues I should address here. Since individuals all have their own attitudes, skills and even some prejudice, here in Royal Hotel the employees lost their interest very fast after they tried the new system in beginning and especially those housekeeping person did not want to replace the new system with the old ones.
They may not be equipped with appropriate skills to adopt computerized device, or they may be just old-fashioned people who cannot accept new trends easily. Structure is crucial here as well because user resistance, incentive systems and relationship in a corporation can heavily affect employees’ behavior, which will lead them to resist the new system. According to the above troubleshooting, there are some solutions here: First of all, I will try to figure out if there is some flaws existed in the new IS that I did not noticed before.
If it is really flawed and cannot work well as I previously expected, I will recommend negotiating with supplier and getting refund back. Alternatively, if the system itself works well, I will try a strategy focusing on “people”. I can set up some more interesting and applicable training program to get the employees’ confidence back and improve their skills to use it.
Otherwise I will suggest the HR department turn over the old staffs and bring in some new blood that can be better fit with and show more tolerance of new computerized device, if circumstance allowed. In addition, I can just try to make some change of the incentive system in royal Hotel. Employee who can more positively accept the new system will be encouraged and get bonus, while others who keep on holding an attitude to resist unreasonably will be warned and fired at last. From the lesson of this program, I should be exactly blamed because I as a director of the whole program had unavoidable responsibility.
I just simply thought of the technology investment, but I neglected the importance of the connection of all crucial parts in an information system design. If I can detect it from beginning, the results can be turn around and the whole program should perform more functional.
