i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Whenever it is possible, your answers to question 12 should include specific details from the Taggit case study below. You should explicitly refer to relevant details by citing in parentheses the line number where they appear in the case study text. For example, in response to a question “how many employees would be affected by any of your recommendations?” you might answer “10 (1), because every employee in the firm would be affected” and the number of employees is mentioned in line 1.

• Where do you think Taggit should invest in making its information more organized, usable and accessible?  Why?
• What kind of technologies, policies or actions would you apply at the company-wide level? 
• What kind of technologies, policies or actions would you apply at the individual employee level? 

CASE STUDY:

Taggit is a small business with 10 employees that sells custom-made novelty items (“schwag” like shirts, mugs, pencils, etc with business logos).  Taggit’s customers include retail outlets, small entrepreneurs, “causes” like political and environmental action groups, and individuals like politicians.  Taggit’s business model operates through an online store where their customers upload logos and taglines and select the items they would like.  Taggit then orders the items from a variety of suppliers, which are then customized and sent to customers.  Taggit has 500+ customers and manages typical transactional information about them including contact information, purchase history, and payment instruments (like credit card numbers), as well as non-transactional content like graphical logos and narrative descriptions of custom and special requests. Taggit also stores similar information about their suppliers.  In addition, Taggit maintains information about and created by their individual employees (not only personal information needed for accounting and payroll, but which businesses/people these employees work with, important emails sent internally, etc.).  Because Taggit is a small firm, its systems and procedures for information organization and management have been somewhat ad hoc. Some information is stored in open source database applications developed in house, some using commercial off-the-shelf software configured to meet Taggit’s needs, and some key information is even stored in Excel spreadsheets on the CEO's computer. Up until now, this ad hoc method has worked OK, albeit with some small annoyances.  Recently, however, a key order was lost because the CEO accidentally deleted 5 rows in her spreadsheet.  This incident coincided with an employee importing information from the wrong database and sending a client a list of the CEO's personal emails.  The CEO is devastated, and many customers and employees are outraged.   You have been hired to give her advice on how to improve things at Taggit.