582102: Johdatus tietojenkäsittelytieteeseen

Case A: The house of Maijala

Maija and Matti Maijala were planning to move to a new house, and they made an offer on an ideal detached house. The sellers accepted the offer, and everything was apparently progressing smoothly.

The Maijalas had applied for a joint mortgage through Mardia bank. In the bank Liisa Lainanen was dealing with their application, contacted LuottoWarma, the credit-rating company that had large databases of mortage histories.

Several days later Liisa telephoned the Maijalas to explain that the credit report from LuottoWarma indicated that Matti had defaulted several years ago on a previous mortgage with the Passia bank. For this reason, Mardia bank was unable to offer a mortgage to the Maijalas. Matti was most annoyed and told Liisa that he had never had any dealings with the Passia bank, so there had to be a mistake. Liisa explained that if the Maijalas wanted a Mardia mortgage to purchase the house in question, then they had to get the problem sorted out very quickly, since another buyer had made an offer on the house and the seller would only wait a couple of days before selling to the other buyer. Liisa gave the Maijalas the telephone number of Tarja Takala, who was her contact person at LuottoWarma. Matti contacted Tarja who immediately investigated the problem. She discovered that there were two Matti Maijalas in the database and both had the same date of birth. The other one had defaulted on a mortgage with Passia bank. Tarja promptly corrected the credit profile of Maija's husband, Matti, and sent a new revised credit rating to Mardia bank. However, this was not in time to prevent the Maijalas from losing the house to the other buyers.

The Maijalas were very disappointed about losing the house, but they were even more concerned that Mardia bank might always associate them with the default at Passia bank.

Tarja discussed the incident with Teppo Tieha, the head of the information systems department at LuottoWarma. There had been an increasing number of complaints about incorrect credit reports, and this latest incident prompted Teppo to speak to Tiina Pomonen, the vice president, about modifying the database and associated systems. His suggestions for modification centered around having unique alphanumeric identifiers for each person in the database, which would eliminate any mistaken identity. Although the cost-benefit analysis of the update did not show a clear financial gain, Teppo believed that the improvement in accuracy would warrant undertaking the work and would prevent future unhappy incidents like the one that affected the Maijalas. Tiina Pomonen, however, considered the errors in the database to be too small to matter and, given the projected cost, decided not to authorize the work.

Assignment A: Evaluate in your report, according to the guidelines (above), the actions of Tarja Takala, Teppo Tieha and Tiina Pomonen in the case described above. Should the case be closed in LuottoWarma? Justify your answer according to the guidelines given before the cases.
Case B: Niina's dilemma

LaatuTietoJärjestelmäRatkaisut (LTJR) was a major well-respected computer hardware and software vendor operating nationwide. Niina Apunen worked as a user-support software engineer at the LTJR regional center in the middle of the country. She communicated with her customers mainly by telephone and email. Reported program bugs were passed on to technical support agents, and Niina provided software patches to her customers over telephone lines, usually via a computer-to-computer connection.

In addition, whenever Niina heard about difficult software problems, she visited the customer personally. Until last year, her on-site support and occasional training were provided as part of the customers maintenance contracts. As a result of Niina's expertise, this service became very popular and thus very costly for LTJR, so the on-site support service was split from maintenance and billed separately.

During a recent economic recession, LTJR's fortunes declined. As a result, salaries were frozen for 18 months. After that, times continued to be difficult, and people were losing their jobs. Niina believed that it was only a matter of time before she became a casualty. She knew, however, that she was still valuable to LTJR, and her boss had said that she would be the first to get a pay raise when it became possible.

One of LTJR's largest customers, and one of Niina's most important clients, was EtuPaikka (EP) with offices throughout the country. Over a period of time she had established a close relationship with many key employees at EP offices, and there were several offices where employees needed a lot of technical help and training. EP preferred to enter into a contract with LTJR, rather than develop its own in-house expertise. Niina had been working closely with Mikko Makkonen in the Information Services Department of EP, and they know each other well and had high professional respect for each other.

Last week, Mikko telephoned Niina at home.

"Niina, I have a proposition you might be interested in."

"What is it?"

"The main office needs someone to help them with their new system. It's the new EtuApu system that LTJR installed six months ago and they desperately need support and training. It is the sort of thing you're expert at. Do you want to take it on?"

"It sounds interesting. Just send some details to the office and I'll put the wheels in motion."

"Let me explain. We don't want LTJR to handle the job; we want you to do it personally. If we go to LTJR, it will take ages to set it up, and what's more we will have to pay LTJR's overhead."

"I'm not sure, Mikko. You're offering to pay me for the type of work which LTJR pays me for and that feels odd."

"I don't think so, and we want you to do the job, not some other consultant who might be allocated by LTJR. EP is important to LTJR, particularly the work at the main office. I'm sure if we explained the situation to your management they would agree to go along with the arrangement."

"Why don't we then? What's the rush? Put a proposal to them and maybe they can sort something out in a couple of weeks."

"Niina, you don't understand. We can't wait that long! EtuApu was installed to rectify serious problems that we were having in managing the complex benefits package. We simply have to have it working in the very near future. We won't ask you for any time that would interfere with your normal work schedule at LTJR. We'll fit in with your schedule because we know you'll do a great job. To make it worth your while, we'll pay you 25% above the normal rate and give you a 30% bonus on completion of the job. Please come and work for us on this one job."

Niina said nothing. She was pleased that her reputation was so good, and she was overwhelmed by the size of the financial offer. It would certainly provide some extra funds if she were to be let go by LTJR. But she wondered about the consequences if LTJR were to find out, and she was undecided about what to do.

Assignment B.