Starting Your Internship at Club IT

Club IT is a downtown music venue managed and owned by Ruben Keys and Lisa Tejada. They both graduated with degrees in Business Administration in 2005, and decided to follow their dream to open a nightclub. During college, they supported themselves by working as musicians, Lisa playing jazz violin and Ruben on drums, so they learned quite a bit about nightclub operations from experience, in addition to business principles learned from their studies. Lisa and Ruben have just completed extensive remodeling of the interior of Club IT and are pleased with the results. Its high ceilings and high energy lighting creates an ambience of fun and energy. For music, they hire live bands on Fridays and Saturdays and have a live DJ Tuesdays through Thursdays (closed on Sundays). The DJ uses a collection of MP3 playlists, playing hip-hop, techno, and electronic with some Top 40’s thrown in.
Lisa and Ruben run the office and maintain all financial and business-related records. They realize that while the resources they spent on remodeling are paying off well, their information management is lagging behind. Their next project is a full analysis of their information needs, and to start it off, they have hired you as an intern.
To prepare for your first day of work, you and a few friends decide to spend a Friday evening at Club IT. Your visit is very enjoyable – you have made some new friends, learned some new dance steps, and really rocked with the great band. Reporting to work on Monday afternoon, you wonder though, how much information technology a nightclub can possibly need, and if there will be enough information and technology analysis opportunities to justify your internship at Club IT.
Sitting in the empty club a few hours before opening, you have your initial meeting with Ruben and Lisa. They give you background on the club and an overview of their need to boost their information technology, data management, and decision-making capabilities. Your first task is to get acquainted with the club and its operations, so Lisa has you log into their website from her desk in their tiny back office.
The current IT configuration of the workstations used by Lisa and Ruben in the Club IT back office is as follows:
a. Pentium Processor
b. 1GB of RAM
c. Ethernet Adapter
d. 17” Color Display
e. Windows XP Professional
f. Internet is Comcast High-speed to modem hardwired to computer

Much of the work at Club IT involves manual activity (cooking; setting, serving and clearing tables; escorting guests to tables; etc.) conventional keyboard data entry is often impractical.

Before proceeding, please look over their current web pages to include employee only sections. higheredbcs.wiley.com/legacy/college/rainer/0470169001/club_it/index.html

System Requirements

During a meeting with Ruben Keys and Lisa Tejada, they express some of their current perceived problems. Keeping track of inventory has been a major problem. They have run out of the most popular menu items six different times in the last month while being way oversupplied in items that were not moving.

Both Ruben and Lisa are comfortable with MS Office, to include Access. They know an Access database would be better than Excel spreadsheets but they are not sure why or how to set it up.

Ideally they would like a system that would adjust inventory levels the moment an article is ordered with the waitress. Then a notification or an automatic order would be generated when certain inventory levels are met. They would also like to see reports that showed trend data such as: the sale of different items, if a particular waitress had higher sales, or if time of the day had an effect on sales of different items. Security is always a concern as Lisa is extremely worried about anyone gaining access to their data.

Your internship could last the entire summer but they would like to evaluate you for the first 8 weeks. During that time, they would like a completed initial proposal (containing a Preliminary Investigative Report and System Requirements) by week 4, and a System Design Specification by week 7.

A template for the proposal has been provided to you and any questions that you have for Ruben and Lisa can be asked in the forum entitled “Questions for Rueben and Lisa.”