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Operational Feasibility is concerned with the impact
the system will have on the every day working practices of
ABC Travel. At present, the core sales are generated via email,
phone and direct purchasing in the shop. It is predicted that
the introduction of online sales will release time for staff
to assist more offline customers, which would increase the
company's revenue. The online information about the company
and travel arrangements will provide customers with the information
they need without having to contact the company directly,
which would further release the staff's time to perform other
revenue generating tasks. Moreover, as the website will be
on a search engine, it is predicted that an increase in ABC
Travel's customer base will occur. Therefore, the time saved
due to online services will be utilised to provide services
to the larger customer base that the website will generate.
Economic Feasibility: The main question that has
to be considered in the feasibility study is whether the system
is financially viable. All feasibility studies for information
systems should include a cost-benefit analysis. A cost-benefit
analysis is the process of evaluating the costs against the
benefits of the system. The costs and benefits can be tangible
or intangible. An intangible cost or benefit are very difficult
to measure and are usually determined through assumptions.
Three options were considered by ABC Travels. They could
buy an Application Service Provider (ASP), which provide companies
with a standard e-commerce site, 1.5% transaction fee and
5000 as a setup fee. This however was not considered suitable
for ABC as they recognised that the site had to be unique
so as to appeal to the different categories of users that
frequent their premises. An other option was to hire a professional
web designer to design the web site. The staff at ABC were
not sure what they wanted the website to offer and were familiar
with the concept of programmers charging large fees for changes
to the requirements after they had been defined. This option
was therefore postponed until they had a clearer idea of what
the website was to offer and look like. The final option was
to use a student to design the website and perhaps employ
a professional web designer afterwards once the requirements
had been defined. The latter option was therefore undertaken.
Maintenance Issues
A requirement of the system is to keep it constantly updated.
ABC Travels needed a colloquial way to make small changes
to the deals other sections in the website. Mr X advised me
that the staff at ABC have limited knowledge of HTML and web
design and it was not feasible to employ a full time web designer
to maintain the site. There were therefore two options considered:
buy a package such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage to
maintain the site, or to design a separate system to enable
the staff to make small changes. As discussions continued,
it became clear that the first option was not feasible. Furthermore,
as the web development programs are very sensitive to change,
the staff could accidentally make unwanted changes, which
would require additional time and money to rectify and could
warrant the need for professional help. The only viable option
therefore was to build an internal system which would allow
ABC to change specific aspects of the website frequently,
simply and safely.
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