Chuckle and Sue is a medium-sized, Perth-based firm of solicitors who specialize in providing advice to the yachting industry. Twelve months ago the partners decided to install their first computer system to help them process a rapidly increasing volume of accounting transactions and to obtain better management information on the state of their practice. The system that the firm chose comprised a local area network of six workstations connected to a 5 gigabyte hard disk. The software obtained was all off-the-shelf packages.

Since the system was installed, the six workstations have been used in the following way: One has been used as an update terminal to process transactions against the various ledgers and client files; one has been used as an inquiry terminal by the receptionist/secretary to answer questions from clients; and the other four have been used by the partners to inquire on client files and to print information they need for billing purposes.

Because transaction volumes have been increasing rapidly, the partners decided to add a seventh workstation to the network to act as an update terminal. As soon as one of the accounts clerks began to use the workstation to update files, however, response time in the network degraded significantly. As a consequence, Gloria Chuckle, the senior partner in the firm, approached the computer company that had sold the system to her firm to determine the cause of the problem. A salesperson from the vendor informed her that the local area network configuration was an inappropriate configuration to use if the seventh workstation was to be used as an update terminal. He advised her to sell off the workstations and the network and to purchase a minicomputer system that would drive seven terminals.

Required: You are an information systems consultant in the firm of accountants that has Chuckle and Sue as their client. Gloria has approached your partner to seek his advice on the veracity of the information provided by the vendor's salesperson. She is clearly upset by the prospective costs of converting to a new system and the associated disruption that will occur. Your partner asks you to prepare a brief report outlining how you will determine the cause of the problems in the current system as a basis for then deciding on an appropriate solution to these problems.