The Caregroup Case Study

Case 1 Write - up
Background
On October 1996, there was one massive merges happened in the Eastern Massachusetts. The merge was driven by financial pressures and intensified competition, which finally resulting in CareGroup, a hospital group with $1.6 billion in revenue, the second-largest group of hospitals in eastern Massachusetts. The CareGroup formed in a three-way merge by three hospitals at beginning, and then encompassed four other hospitals. By 2002, all of these hospitals had been brought together on a common system with the Meditech software at the center. This system was believed to be the most advanced network system in the United States.

1. a. What is the problem?
On November 2002, a researcher in the CareGroup network had begun
At first, the IT system of CareGroup is highly complex, the system grew bigger and bigger through merge, and individual smaller network were being added one at a time. Eventually, the network became "Out of spec” because it contained numerous instances of more than seven network segments connected by bridges or switches. In other words, there was no clear pathway for data and the algorithms were not operate anymore. Secondly, rule of the Ethernet Protocol is also one significant reason that why the collapse happened. Computers on a small network communicates like a meeting of a small number of people. It only works well when there are only one computer is talking, or a collision happens. In this case, there were multiple queries, which means multiple computers were trying to pass the information at the same time. It confused the system, and the system finally failed to respond to any of them. The last but not the least, CareGroup didn’t control the system well. In this case, CareGroup could operate one paper-base system when they encounter the electronic downtime, but since the stuff were not experienced and fully prepared, systems which supposed to work together-primary and backup were confused with each other, and all became primary in the end. CareGroup missed the chance when they could come
As a future IT manager, we should correctly understand the system we manage, and also the security needs to be implemented. Also, I think keep one staff as the real-time monitor to the system would be necessary. It would be helpful to solve the problem at the very beginning, and prevent things get worse. Even if the monitor realized that he would not be able to handle the problem right, there would still be suffcient time to contact the vendor before things get worse. We could also train the entire IT team in the functions of how the IT department work, so that we would got multiple choices when we encounter