Question

Describe/come up with an information systems problem that you would apply the below Problem Solving Strategy. Explain how each of the steps below would apply to solving the problem.

System Problem Solving Strategy:

1. Recognize the issue
2. Identify the facts
3. Define additional data that would be helpful
4. Make assumptions necessary
5. Determine alternative approaches
6. Evaluate alternatives
7. Make recommendations
8. Alter assumptions and rework solutions
9. Reflect on lessons learned

Answer 1

Problem solving becomes an unavoidable part of our life and we do problem solving each and every day in our life. The problem solving can be in any areas (inter personal issue, system issue, physoclogical issue etc...).

The Best problem solving technique for resolving System Related issues is "Root Cause Analysis". RCA states that a issue can be arrested completely,only by knowing its roots and it need to be fixed. This is a very successful approach and being used for resolving Daily to day small IT related issues.

Recognize the Problem:

Company XYZ offering technogical support to Investment company. Recent days, Client (investement company) complaints that their investor reports slowness in receipt of Account statement ,if they request during Morning 6-8 am. they also complainta that, the account statment request, will be received after an average of 3 hours delay.

Identification of facts:

- Review the request in time and output sent time for all the accoutn statment request received during last month.

- From review it has been identifed that the slowness is generally observed between 6 am to 8 am particularly on Monday and Fridays

- List the activities performed by systems during Monday and Friday during the mentioned time

- From the activities review ,it is understood new patch deployments and system auto triggered accoutn statments are huge during those times.

Addtional Data:

From the initatl analysis, it is observed that the system load is high during those slots. Hence w eneed to analsyse the performance of Load balance happening in the servers.

Assumptions:

Assume that the load balancing are fine and loads are getting distributed evenly to servers.

Alternative Approaches

- Load Balancing is working Fine.

- system triggered account statment and new patch deployments are also inevitable processed.

Also the number of new patches and system triggered account statment will keep on getting increased in the future, hence adding additonal servers in load balancing /reduction of load limit would not be an optimal solution.

Our solution should be sustainable in long term to eradicate this issue.

Determining and evalulating Alternative approach:

The sustainable approach to arrest this problem is alloting a dedicated server ,which will not get disturbed during new patch deployemnt and it will be used to handle only request based Account statment triggeres.

Alloting a new server for this service incur cost but, if we make this server dedicated for serving all investor request related operation, then it would be optimal and it will also delight customer through the resposne speed.

Recommendations

Currently there are no dedicated servers to handle the request based services to customers. Being in a service industry, delighting customer through faster response is need of hour ,due to advancements of technogy interms of capacity and performance speed.

All the investor requested based services will be routed through new server,which will not get disturbed due to patch deployments and system triggered process/statements.

if any downtime required in the new server, then prior intiamtion should be passed to client ,so that they will display a maintanance page in ther website and investor will not submit any requests during that time.

Alter assumptions and rework solutions

We have assumed that the load balancing is workign Fine. If we alter the assumption and assume that the load balancing is not working properly /shortage of server to handle the heavy load during that time.

since at Max loads,the performance of the servers dropeed, then we should provide cushion of 20% and set the max load at 80%. Post which we should analyse ,how many servers are requuried to handle the peak laod and then addtional servers should be added.

Reflections of lessons learned

A problem can be arrested only when the roots of the are properly identifed, correctly evalulated and then finding solution to arrest in long term sustainable way.