The Disaster in London-The LAS Case study Description of the case situation This case describes the process where London Ambulance Service throughout the last 20 years has tried to implement a new and it-based despatch system. There have been several phases and parts of the project, and when looking back at it today the period is characterized by chaos and problems. Starting in the early 1980’s with LAS realizing their manual system had to change because of inefficiency, too high level of human dependence and problems with managing the national three minute activation standard. The proposal was a computer-aided dispatch system with a computer map display and automatic vehicle location system. The project and development started in 1987 but after three and a half years the project was terminated with overruns on both time and costs. After a review of the first project LAS started to search for an operating dispatch system, but none satisfied LAS requirements. They had to develop a new system and decided to go for one which would go even further than the first try in human independence. With intention of doing better than first time the plans for the new software was developed with an eye to saving cost and especially time, and this created an outline for choice of contractor. In March 1991 Apricot was chosen as main contractor for the hardware, while System Options was in charge of software development. There were early signals that both Apricon and System Options in this project were facing bigger challenge than they’d ever met before, and LAS did not consider references that claimed both lack of technical skills and ability to keep the time limits. In the period between this and January 8 when the system was to be finished LAS experienced some internal problems with reduction and restructuring in both budget and staff which led to lack of stability and less satisfying working conditions. The employees were not involved in the development process and there were no training or education provided. At the same time they understood that the system wasn’t working to expectations and that they wouldn’t make time-limit. On basis of this they had to make a new schedule were they divided the remaining work and needed implementation processes into three phases. This break down of implementation structure and rush of implementation led to immediate software errors, equipment failures and other problems. Still they did not prioritized testing of software, and the backup system was not cleared.
...System (SMS). Knowing that the Harley-Davidson’s employees were not very susceptible to quick changes, SiL’k team made sure to employ company’s model to highlight People, Processes and Technology for any change initiatives. Additionally, company’s Technology decisions were differed to company’s Architecture Integration group to ensure all technical solutions will be compatible with existing Information Systems architecture. Last but not least, the team took an open communication approach and throughout the process, each party involved, shared their monthly updates as well as project newsletter that communicated objectives, activities and progress to the community. This was clearly an ultimate teams collaborative effort, which brought them all toward shared vision of the new process and activities, resulted in shareholder’s decision in favor of the new supplier.
This article deals with the topic of how organizations should go about implementing new technology systems. The article is built around Murphy's Law that, "Whatever can go wrong, will." When organizations implement new system a lot of know problems cannot be avoided and unforeseen problems arise with even grater frequency. Chew outlines seven points to help launch a new system with greater success since they are essential for long-term survival.
The lessons learned from the CareGroup network collapse: 1. Don’t hesitate to bring in experts to make sure your network is configured properly. Correct assessment, however the lesson doesn’t factor in when to bring in an expert. Despite an over-reliance on technology, there needs to be a timeframe for this expert and how their analysis will support overall technological requirements.
The world of healthcare changes every day. Technology, as we know it evolves and changes the actual care that patients receive and even post care as well. It has been determined that most faults are caused by system failures. When a break in the system has occurred it must then be decided where the,” inefficiencies, ineffective care and preventable errors” to then influence changes within the broken system (Hughes, 2008). Improvements sometimes can begin with measurements and benchmarks which in turn will allow organizations to assess the trouble spots and broken areas within the system. Many times those broken areas within the system will be owned by the humans who operate within these systems. According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM)
Wake County EMS responds to almost 90,000 requests for service annually and serves almost 1 million people, which places the WCEMS system in the top fifty EMS systems in the country based on call volume and size of population served. ("Wake county department," 2012) In response to ever-increasing call volume, a decrease in primary care, and the universal changes in healthcare, which have resulted in more people using EMS and the local emergency room for primary care and non-life threatening events, the EMS Department elected to change their service structure. The department would move away from the traditional EMS mantra of “you call we haul” and having a system being designed around reactive responses to healthcare issues in the community to an evidenced based incident prevention structure. No longer, would it be considered prudent or correct to just continue to add transport resources to address the increasing call volume and continue to place the actual burden of care on the local hospitals, it would become the burden of the EMS system to provide alternatives to properly address the actual healthcare needs of those who called 911. Wake County EMS had already utilized evidenced based ...
...e for a Phone Outage?" HIMSS. Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), 10 Feb. 2014. Web. 11 Feb. 2014. .
The development (or iteration) of the new system was approved due to successful budgetary results over the previous two years and growth trends expected over the next two years. Additionally, ongoing maintenance on the system as problems began to arise was beginning to negatively influence production performance, and a need to iterate the system to incorporate evolving production goals was identified. The successful budget of the previous years encouraged the approval of replacing the current conversion system with a successor that promises to increase production performance while lowering the fixed costs of salaried programmers needed to maintain it.
Health information management involves the practice of maintaining and taking care of health records in hospitals, health insurance companies and other health institutions, by the use of electronic means (McWay 176). Storage of medical information is carried out by health information management and HIT professionals using information systems that suit the needs of these institutions. This paper answers four major questions concerning health information systems.
The main problems that are affecting the company were the high level of labour turnover, below target production rates, high levels of scrap, the employees had little input in the decision making, therefore resulting in low motivation and job satisfaction, and didn't have enough feedback on there performance. Added to this was the conflict between the supervisors and employees in the production and packing areas, and the grading and payment levels wasn't satisfactory to the employees.
The requirements were not well defined and the stakeholders kept on adding new features to during the development there were no clear goals defined. This led to the shift of delivery time and affected the quality.
The hospital needs to find a way to improve the tracking of Voice Over IP (VOIP) calls within the hospital and also wants to have a program to improve response time of medical personnel by using the GPS to locate the closes vehicle to the emergency. A design will need to be made of the Requires and Provides interfaces of two components that might be used in the VOIP system. A design of the interface is needed for two components that may be used in the vehicle discovery component to find the nearest vehicle to the incident with the Requires and Provides interfaces.
The user requirements were not taken into consideration thus affecting the purchasing orders, poor management of inventory, the manufacturing and finance department were not integrated. This also required a lot of recoding thus costing AMP Canada further investment
In October of 1992, the new computer aided dispatch system of the London Ambulance Service (LASCAD) failed to meet the demands of use and brought their operations to a standstill. Dispatchers could no longer locate ambulances, multiple ambulances showed up for the same calls, errors built up in the queue slowing the system down further, and callers became frustrated as the hours went by with no ambulance showing up (London Ambulance Service Unofficial, n.d.). In addition, it has been targeted for causing the deaths of approximately 20-30 people in the process, due to excessive wait times for transport to the hospital. This unfortunate incident is one of the poster children for examples of the ramifications of poor management and lack of process in software development.
In today's changing business environment, information technology plays an incredibly important role in almost every aspect of the day to day life of almost every industry. The transportation industry is, of course, no different. From the transport of goods from manufacture, to warehousing, to retail, to end-user, the industry relies on information technology to get things done. The transportation of people is the exact same; incredibly important to get done yet impossible without the impact of information technology.
In any organizations management would have to contend with any unavoidable changes that might take place. New machines, equipment, unstable business environment etc. can bring these changes. Successful implementation of the product therefore depends on the ability of the management to deal with the changes and resolve any emerging conflicts there from.