Section B

Answer all questions in this section based on the case study provided below.

The SwinPublicTransport was established in 1960, as a separate entity, to look after public transportation in Imagination City. The widely dispersed nature of Imagination City's population poses significant challenges for SwinPublicTransport in its quest to provide efficient and quality services. A particular problem they face is that their drivers do not stay in the company for long, which leads to higher costs of recruitment and training of new drivers.

Sarah, the CEO of SwinPublicTransport, has been very concerned with the ever-increasing cost of training new drivers. One particularly restrictive and costly requirement is that each new driver needs to qualify by passing a series of driving tests, and then be accompanied by an experienced driver, acting as a mentor, for at least the first month of driving. These training procedures were designed to provide the drivers with both a knowledge of their transport routes, and an understanding how to use the company's logistic system. Needless to say, this training is expensive because the company has to pay both the driver and mentor to drive one vehicle in the mentoring period. In other words, two drivers are required to drive one income generating and service providing vehicle. With these considerations in mind, Sarah has appointed a team of business analysts to develop new and innovative ideas to solve this and associated transport problems in the Imagination City area.

The team of business analysts came up with the idea of using Virtual Reality (VR) to provide more efficient training, without the need of a mentor. VR provides a simulated experience that is similar to the real world. Their reasoning was that VR would save them a considerable amount of money by making the training process quicker and more efficient.

Ali, the IT Manager, was impressed with the idea because the current developments in Artificial Intelligence had made this technology feasible. His view was that the company could benefit from VR. However, Ali's enthusiasm for this technologically driven solution was not shared by Clare, the Finance Manager, who cut across him to pose a few points of her own. Those points were that this technology was very costly and, consequently, unviable. An alternative approach to spending a vast amount of the company's resources on new technology, that was not guaranteed to fix the problem, would be to change the company's staff retention policies to reduce the turn-over of drivers.

John, the Human Resource Manager, joined the conversation by saying to Clare that, according to labour relation's agreement with the Bus Drivers' Union, the company could not simply add an extra clause to the drivers' contracts of employment, obliging them to stay with the company. He noted that the company could make it more attractive for drivers to stay by providing them with financial incentives, but this would also be expensive for the company. John was supportive of the VR option because it could decrease the one month period of mentor-accompanied driving to just a couple times. This would not only decrease costs, but also speed up the training process by making it more efficient. His only misgiving about using VR was whether the company possessed the capacity and skills to work with the new technology.

In her summing up of the meeting, Sarah commended the innovativeness of the idea but raised concerns about compliance issues, and with regulations. She was not sure that the government, the regulatory bodies or even the Bus Divers' Union would accept VR training as an alternative to face-to-face, hands-on training. On the other side of the coin, however, she was sure that VR training would be well supported by the Public and the local environmentalist groups because it would lead to less on-road training hours for drivers, which, in turn, would lead to less CO2 emissions and traffic congestion. As a final note, she thought that VR would result in less traffic accidents because much of the training would be conducted in virtual reality.

(1)Conduct a CATWOE analysis for any two stakeholders in SwinPublicTransport from the list below(2 x 3 =6 marks):

• The CEO of SwinPublicTransport who is looking to improve the efficiency and quality of the services.
• Human Resource manager who believes that adding an extra clause to the drivers' contracts of employment obliging them to stay with the company could be a better solution.
• Bus Drivers' Union who are concerned about jobs for their members.
• Staff needing to learn how to use the new technology.

Merely identifying each element of 'CATWOE' would not demonstrate analysis. You are required to briefly discuss each element. You are also expected to demonstrate your knowledge of the importance / priority/ precedence of the five elements in CATWOE.

(2)Take any one of the two stakeholders that you conducted a CATWOE analysis in the previous question, and develop a root definition for the intended transformation.