Risk and Technology

Case study

Part (c)

Winglet’s executive managers have reviewed your process flow diagram and the problem areas you identified in the booking process. They suggest applying automation technologies to resolve the booking process issues; however, they only have a limited understanding of automation technologies.

The managers have asked you to advise them on how to improve the current booking process using automation technologies. Before you begin, you meet with them to hear more about their requirements.

Below are extracts from your respective discussions with the CEO and CIO.

Chief Executive Officer

“I’m glad we were able to fit this time in. Thanks for all your work and analysis so far.

Firstly, I’d like to say that I am worried that the current process isn’t very efficient, and we’re concerned that it might negatively impact customer experience in the long term.

So, to help avoid that, I suggest automating the existing process using artificial intelligence capabilities.

However, I don’t think basic robotic process automation should be considered currently. I am concerned it might be too complex and too expensive to implement.

So, here are some things I’d like to see in the automation solution:

I want to make sure that customers can’t make a payment before the vendors have confirmed that the requested flight and seat are available. This would help with managing the refund process and thus improve our reputation for reliability.

It would be great if the way the automation solution is designed and implemented could allow it to be used in other areas, such as accounting, finance and HR.

Also, I think that the automation solution should generate immediate cost savings in the first year, otherwise the investment would be a waste of time and money.

While I think of it, last week I was talking with one a CEO who felt very positive about cognitive computing and virtual assistance becoming the modern standard. Apparently, these aspects can be easily integrated into a process automation solution and are not expensive. So, I’d really like you to consider those technologies when you’re developing and implementing the solution.”

Chief Information Officer

Thanks for coming to see me. I wanted to catch up with you to provide you with some more information on our existing IT infrastructure, which is very rigid. The architecture isn’t set up in a way that allows us to implement big changes, but we can easily adjust it to automate simple, repeatable, rules-based tasks.

It would be a huge effort, however, to change the current infrastructure to accommodate the feature of allowing customers to pay only after their flight is confirmed as available.

Redesigning the existing IT infrastructure would also be very costly, particularly if we want to add that feature.

As well as the effort and cost, making these large-scale changes would mean we’d need to proactively monitor and manage security risks and compliance. Our current systems are secure and meet all the common IT security standards, so we’d need to be confident that changes wouldn’t disrupt that. We are also currently short-staffed on specialist IT experts.

Another issue is that our current systems are closely integrated with the air-travel providers IT infrastructures. If we want to add a feature such as paying for a flight after it is confirmed as available, we’d need to negotiate with the airtravel providers to make sure they adapt to these changes and align their IT infrastructure to our needs.

The executive managers ask you to evaluate how automation could be used to resolve the problem areas you identified in Winglet’s booking process.

Your tasks

Continue writing the report you created in response to part (a) and part (b).

You should address the following:

Task 9: Based on the case study information, for each of the problem areas you identified in Task 8, explain whether automation technologies could improve that problem area.

Task 10: Discuss three potential ethical issues that Winglet needs to consider when implementing the automation solutions suggested in your response to Task 9.