IT6 Project

The TSI OS has several constraints that are a huge burden to the day to day operations of the company. The deficiencies in its operating system have a huge toll in the operations and day to day activities of the company. Not only do these constraints affect a company, they also affect its customers, and how they access services from TSI. Customers have to face a lot of problems when accessing these services, especially during peak hours when the load on the system is enormous. This stretches the burden even more, not only on the operations in the company, but also creates business related challenges to the company in areas such as customer recruitment and retention.

TSI experiences several business related challenges due to the state of its TSI Operating System. The first and one of the most visible challenges is the challenge in customer service. Due to the constraints in the TSI OS, the system provides its users with poor services, especially during peak periods. During these times, the system is overloaded, and experiences deadlocks, which cause the users to experience system crashes as they use the site. This greatly affects customer satisfaction, which may be a great barrier to the company in being able to retain its customers and keep them interested.

The company also has to cater for the high cost of maintaining the system. Due to the fragile nature of the system, the constant crashes and reboots often require programmers and technical experts to be on site in the backroom all the time, so that they can resolve any running errors that occur. This becomes expensive for the company, as the skills needed to maintain such a fragile and rigid system are very high. Also, the company pays programmers to modify their open source software, which is a very expensive venture because they require highly experienced software programmers for the job.

In a recent example, British Airways, a leading airline company worldwide faced for the sixth time in a year, global IT failures. In 2017, the company experienced six major software failures that affected flights, their worldwide call centres, their website as well as their mobile app. This resulted in a full blown lockdown in May of 2017, where the airlines cancelled all their flights from Heathrow and Gatwick airports, which are major hubs in their airline network. Further studies showed that the error was indeed avoidable, but the airline had made hundreds of the staff in its IT department redundant in the previous year, 2016 (Hatton, 2017).

As a customer of TSI, the TSI Operating System would cause a lot on inconvenience in my productivity at work. Because it is unable to perform multi-processing, it would require me to dig deeper into my pocket, as well as spend time and effort in finding old hardware that has single core software, so as to be compatible with the TSI system. The system would also cause a lot of inconvenience for me in the case where it crashed while I was in the middle of an important activity, process or transaction on the system. This would result in many troubles, such as loss of data and waste of time and resources. I would be forced to repeat the same activity several times during peak hours if the system crashed in the middle of a transaction.

Reference Hatton, L. (2017). Software failures-follies and fallacies. IEE Review, 43(2), 49-52.