Case Study : STARS AIR AMBULANCE

If I was given the task of determining the mission statement, I would include the use of the words people and technology in the mission, since it appears STARS need skilled and dedicated staff to achieve their goal. They also plan to replace their current fleet of helicopters for faster and longer range coverage of their service. The mission statement could be as follows:
Providing a safe, rapid , highly specialized emergency medical transport system for the critically ill and injured , through the best people and cutting edge technology.
If STARS manage to provide these services to cover the whole state of ALBERTA, then the mission statement could also cover the scope of its geographic operations.

It is very important that the information system is well managed because: * Information increases flexibility with regard to how, when and where resources may be utilized to achieve strategic advantage for the organization. * Enhanced information exchange facilitates collaboration and redefines relationships between an organization, employees, suppliers and the public at large. * Managers will use it to better manage resources towards achieving goals through human resource in an organization.
IS is therefore the thread that links the organization’s activities into an integrated process
Based on my analysis, it can be seen that there is no coherent IS strategy in STARS because from the 72 page STARS Critical, Strategic and Operation Plan, only a single paragraph of IS was mentioned and the STARS organization structure appeared to lack executive level IT representation until the new CIO was recruited.
The IS initiatives in the organization appear to be badly managed by consultants who: * overcharge the organization for menial tasks such as changing passwords or fixing printers * in one case, did not provide a timeline for a project. * Did not follow procedures of providing quotations before commencing work.

Additionally, the new CIO’s predecessor was doing outside consulting assignments and did not appear to fully focus on the IS job in hand.
It also appears that there are several tasks that have been setup historically for whatever reason that could be streamlined and perhaps centralized for better control by the IS department. Most IS projects seemed to be purely reactive in nature, without little forethought and planning.
Hence a complete review of architecture, configuration, maintenance and administration of the entire STARS network will be needed, that would have an impact on STARS current and future operations and decision making processes.
In an organization, more than 80% of an organization’s business content is semistructured or unstructured, hence business value of improved decision making will help Improve hundreds of thousands of “small” decisions which then adds up to large annual value for the business . The types of decisions could include unstructured decisions where the decision maker must provide judgment, evaluation, and insight to solve problems. It will also include structured decisions where repetitive and routine decisions are made involving a definite procedure for handling so they do not have to be treated each time as new.
It appears therefore that STARS will need to build a knowledge management system, which will include the following aspects: * Enterprise-wide knowledge management systems. These are general-purpose firm-wide efforts to collect, store, distribute, and apply digital content and knowledge, * Knowledge work systems (KWS). These are specialized systems built for helicopter pilots, nurses, paramedics and other professionals such experts in clinical operations, aviation, engineering, communications, disaster preparedness and base operations which comprised the STAR Air Ambulance service ( Shock Trauma Air Rescue Society. * Intelligent techniques. These are diverse group of techniques such as data mining for various goals that will include discovering knowledge, distilling knowledge and discovering optimal solutions for better decision making.
Some collaboration with major knowledge management system vendors will also need to be established which will allow access to powerful portal technologies which will also allow access to external information, news feeds, research, access to internal knowledge resources as well as collaboration technologies for new technologies.
As STARS plan to replace its fleet of helicopters and provide faster and longer range coverage of services, it is vital that an efficient IS system is in place to better manage day to day communications to support current and future operations. In addition, able IS personnel at executive and operational level will be needed by STARS to manage the knowledge management systems.

The role of an IS development is to ensure it supports the needs of the organization, its suppliers, and the general public it serves. The key role will be to ensure good information and therefore systems will need to de designed, developed and supported for day to day operations as well as management decisions to support medium and longer term planning.
In day to day operations, IS needs to support and facilitate communication in urban as well as rural areas in the state of ALBERTA. Information on maps and facilities to assist flight crews attending to accident sites will form the basic information for STARS to locate and land their helicopters safely as well as use Geographical Position System(GPS) technology to display real-time location of each helicopter on a monitor in the operations room.
The Emergency Link Center(ELC) that developed into a sophisticated communications system linking various players such as hospitals, ground ambulance services, police, firefighters, search and rescue organizations and park wardens will need to be supported and maintained.
In addition, as the organization became more complex with the formation of STARS Centre of Education and Research and the Alberta STARS Service Foundation, additional demands will be placed on the IS department to support these activities.
Additionally, IS will need to implement security measures to prevent loss of data, exposure to risk and fraud and plan for disaster recovery. Information system costs and benefits will need to be weighed to quantify tangible and intangible aspects and assigned monetary value. IS will need to develop systems that displace labor and save space as well as develop and support transaction and clerical systems. This could lead to intangible benefits, more efficient customer service or enhanced decision making and lead to quantifiable gains in the long run.
Hence each initiative whether long or short term will need to be costed. Capital budgeting for information systems using capital budgeting models will be needed to measure the value of investing in long-term capital investment projects. These rely on measures of the firm’s cash outflows, expenditures for hardware, software, labor, cash inflows, projections on potential increased revenue or funding and reduced costs. Examples of such capital budgeting models used for IT projects could include payback method, accounting rate of return on investment, net present value or internal rate of return (IRR).
However, the CIO will have initial funding constraints to develop all of an organization’s IS needs and will need to gain support and commitment of top management, heads of departments for such an initiative. His role will be to lead the initiative and undertake an inventory of all knowledge documents’ and related activities such as paper documents, electronic documents, service activities, projects under way , followed by an effort to define and improve the nature of STARS data, databases, applications and how they are linked. In short, to initially provide a diagrammatic view of STARS entire set of applications and databases and convince top management, heads of department of potential savings that can be made through providing IS department an overall responsibility of all IS projects by increasing efficiency and replacing manual tasks and rationalizing and streamlining standard operating procedures. It may also involve business process reengineering (BPR) initiatives which analyze, simplify, and redesign business processes. The key would be to make paradigm shifts and rethink the nature of STARS mission and defining a new business model for STARS through incremental change throughout the organization.
The CIO will also have to examine the firm’s overall security environment as well as controls governing individual information systems and review technologies, procedures, documentation, training, and personnel. He will also need to simulate disaster to test responses of current technology and evaluate IS staff and other employees ability in dealing with these potential disasters. He will need to list, rank all control weaknesses and estimate probability of their occurrence by assessing financial and organizational impact of each threat and plan disaster recovery planning and devising plans for restoration of disrupted services to ensure business continuity. Initiatives will include setting up of firewalls that may include hardware and/or software to prevent unauthorized access to private networks and intrusion detection systems whilst monitoring vulnerable points on networks to detect and deter intruders. This will require identification of the plans that impact the firm’s most critical systems and business processes since a lack of security and control can lead to loss of vital information. Failed computer systems can lead to significant or total loss of business function.
The CIO should govern design, security, and use of computer programs and data throughout organization’s IT infrastructure. This will involve responsibility of hardware, software, and manual procedures to create an overall control environment . Such general controls will cover wide areas such as software controls, hardware controls,computer operations controls,data security controls,implementation controls and administrative controls.

The problems that other departments are placing upon the CIO is that there is no clear responsibility as to who is actually responsible for IS initiatives in STARS. Each department employed their own systems staff and had IS projects underway. Some projects were operating on the organization’s network and could significantly affect network effectiveness and response time. The former IS Director had decided not to participate in these technology efforts by other departments and this further encouraged them to proceed on their own but this caused responsibility problems. For example, a huge dispatch system costing $500,000 had been developed. Technology appeared sound but the project was being managed by a consultant who lacked a line of responsibility to the company.
The CIO also found that other departments used outside consultants and vendors to do maintenance work on the systems that consultants had developed, instead of calling on the IS department to perform such work. An added concern was consultants were using their own methodologies to managed their projects and found some had self-appointed project managers, usually someone internally who had an interest in the project. In other cases, project leaders were ‘volunteers’ from within the initiating department. Occasionally, a department head would show up at the IS door with some new system that had been developed within the department, instructing IS to implement it.
Each department seemed to be acting in a decentralized manner in developing and managing IS initiatives and this will cause duplication of efforts. In effect, STARS had a distributed IS budget in which some individual departments hired their own IS staff or contractors, purchased their own computer equipment and developed their own applications, independent of the IS department and individual departments had created their own silos with regards IS.
If I was the new CIO, I would be able to determine total IS costs for the organization and plan how to solve the problems by coming up with an IS plan , that would integrate all IS initiatives under the responsibility of the CIO of the IS department. I would encourage end users of the applications to provide input during design stages as well as provide feedback during the use of any application implemented. With high levels of user involvement, the system will more likely conform to requirements and users will more likely accept the system. There will be less of any user-designer communication gaps eventhough users can be specialists from different backgrounds, interests and priorities.
I would also aim to resolve the physical infrastructure, since the new CIO found that there was a need to replace a lot of old technology. For example, IS had too many servers and each server was handling only a single application, whereas today a server could handle multiple applications. Also may servers had passed their warranty period and STARS paid costly vendor service visits. One company charged a minimum $2400 for a service visit plus $250 an hour. I would also improve cables and power supply systems and the security of network and systems. In the past, security was handled on a firefighting basis and a consultant invoice for $20K for 1 days work appeared.
In trying to solve these problems, I would also seek management and employee buy-in to my recommendations because management support and commitment, a positive perception by both users and technical staff, sufficient funding and resources will support enforcement of required organizational changes needed for IS initiatives.