Topic: Legal Forms of Business
Consider each of the following forms of business: sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, and franchise. Develop scenarios in which each of these forms of business would be the preferred form. For each scenario, justify why the corresponding business form is preferred.

Write a 550-word paper detailing your scenarios.

Part (2): Case Study Questions           (30 marks in total)                                                               

Virgin system crash may spark multi-million-dollar payout                                

Adopted for exam purpose from The Australian: “Virgin system crash may spark multi-million-dollar payout”, 2010, September 28

Virgin Blue carrier faces a backlash from the business community, and is expected to struggle to convince new corporate clients such as NBN Co its service is up to scratch. Virgin Blue uses the Accenture-owned Navitaire New Skies system as its online booking and check-in system, which is hosted by the vendor in Sydney. Virgin Blue has connected New Skies outputs to its other internally hosted systems for purposes such as managerial report generation and strategic decision making.

The latest crash in 2010 is the second for the system since Virgin spent $10 million to get Navitaire to upgrade New Skies three months ago. Peter Emanuel, chief executive of Sydney-based React Solutions, estimated Virgin Blue’s compensation bill could run into the millions of dollars.

“Navitaire will be faced with a compensation bill of millions of dollars, but how they negotiate that with Virgin is another matter,” Mr Emanuel said. Most third-party software providers would have built into their service level agreements a response time in the event of a system failure. Most such agreements were for 99.9 per cent availability. When a business failed to perform to its contracted commitment it was usually held responsible for compensation of some type, depending on the agreement, he said. “In this case it could run into many millions of dollars to cover lost business, customer compensation and overall cost of regaining customer confidence.”

On September 26 a server failure at Navitaire forced Virgin Blue to resort to manual check-in. This resulted in more than 100 cancelled flights, affecting 100,000-odd passengers. The computer glitch disrupted Virgin Blue flights at airports nationally, as well as the web check-in service, and some Virgin Pacific international flights. “Navitaire had a hardware failure — their server in Sydney had an issue,” Virgin Blue spokesman Colin Lippiatt said. Previous problems with Navitaire were a “different set of issues . . . more of teething problems”, he said.

Late yesterday Navitaire submitted its first report on the incident, showing that at 8am AEST on Sunday the solid-state disk server infrastructure used to host Virgin Blue’s applications failed. This crashed the airline’s internet booking, reservations, check-in and boarding systems. Virgin Blue said its service agreement with Navitaire required any mission-critical system outages to be remedied in a short time but “this did not happen in this instance”.

“It’s going to take a lot to get confidence back from customers, especially since Virgin has been attracting business clients over Qantas,” Mr Emanuel said. In July Virgin Blue snared a two-year travel contract with NBN Co to move its staff around the country as they built the $43 billion National Broadband Network. NBN Co corporate services head Kevin Brown said Virgin Blue was selected after a rigorous tender process that included full-service airline Qantas.

Required:

1- (a) Explain what technical problem caused the crash in Navitaire New Skies system (2 marks)

(b) Based on information available in the case, identify and explain three (3) consequences of the computer crash for Virgin Blue (6 marks)

(8 marks in total)

2- Based on the facts in this case study, is Navitaire New Skies system a transaction processing system (TPS), Decision Support System (DSS), Management Information System (MIS), or Executive Support System (ESS)? (1 mark). Provide Two (2) reasons to support your selection (5 marks).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (6 marks in total)

3- Explain whether Virgin Blue used the traditional SDLC, Joint Application Development (JAD), Application Service Provider (ASP), or Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology for acquiring and using New Skies system for online booking and check-in purposes (1 marks). Justify your answer with two reasons (5 marks)

(6 marks in total

4– If Navitaire decides to use only one of the following diagrams to investigate the crash in New Skies system in details and in a comprehensive manner, which one is more suitable: Process Map, Document Flowchart, Data Flow Diagram, or System Flowchart (1 marks). Justify your answer with two reasons (5 marks)

(6 marks in total)

5- Virgin Blue is considering buying a new system to replace New Skies systems by May 2012. Virgin Blue’s main objective is to ensure their online booking and check-in services are always available for customers. They want to make sure at least until 2014 there is a minimum possible risk for another computer failure for this system.

Explain which conversion method would be more suitable for this objective and why (4 marks).

(4 marks in total)