Your organization uses an online real-time update system for several of its application systems. Recently, there has been concern over increasing response times with the system. The workload has been growing. Nevertheless, because two of the online real-time update systems are used by clerical staff who deal directly with customers, customer goodwill depends on fast response times being maintained. The information systems manager has suggested decreasing response times by seeing whether the introduction of job priority classes and an increase in the time slice allocated to jobs would improve system throughput.

You are the internal auditor in your organization having expertise in performance evaluation. Management asks you to evaluate the changes proposed by the information systems manager. You decide to evaluate the changes using an experiment.

Required: Outline how you would set up the experiment. Describe how you would determine whether the changes proposed are worthwhile. Be sure to describe the sorts of steps you would undertake to try to ensure your results are valid and reliable.