Club IT, Part One
AJ White Jr
University of Phoenix

Club IT, Part One
Club IT is a new nightclub that recently has opened downtown. The club is owned by Ruben Keys and Lisa Tejada. They have just finished remodeling the inside and are very satisfied with the results. Club IT gives a great energy and is a great place to go dance, eat, or just relax with some friends. The club occupies about 6,000 square feet of space with a 600 square foot dance floor, seating for 220, a kitchen for appetizers and short orders, and a bar with four pour stations (Rainer & Turban, 2009). On Friday and Saturday nights, Club IT has live bands. On Monday through Thursday nights the club hires a DJ to play all types of music including: hip hop, techno, electronic, and some top 40s.
A regular club only provides one particular kind of music; they have a tendency to accommodate a small crowd of people. By providing such diversity in their music, Club IT caters to anybody including older adults, married couples, singles, and young-adults. Ruben and Lisa’s mission is clear: they offer a variety of music and drinks to cater to everybody’s lifestyle and want to build a community of friends who meet at the club regularly. Although Club IT is a terrific place to the physical eye, it lacks in the IT department. Ruben and Lisa have hired me on as an intern to help give them a full analysis of their information needs.
Club IT uses an intranet structure. That is, a private network that only the owners and employees of the club can access. Although this is an excellent resource for a club, it needs to have some changes made. First, the security needs to be strengthened. Right now, all the employees have the same login and password giving them access to the same information that the owner’s have. Each employee should have his or her own username and password. This will enable Ruben and Lisa to keep a closer track on their employees. If a crisis would to occurs, they would know where to narrow the problem and they will not have to investigate everyone. Each employee should have different levels of accessibility. For example, Ruben and Lisa should be allowed to see information about every employee whereas Bobby Lee should only be able to access information about himself. This technique will also help evaluate the employees of Club IT. If one has to log onto the cash register with his or her own personal ID, it will keep track of their personal sales, how efficient they are with their time, etc.
Another main issue of Club IT is how to manage their information resources. Club IT is a relatively small business, therefore it would probably not benefit from hiring on a CIO. Because I was hired on to be an intern, I think it would be best if I were to manage all of the information resources, at least until I can train Ruben and Lisa, or until they generated enough revenue to hire a CIO. However, Ruben and Lisa would be actively engaged in the IT. They would need to see the total sales, inventory, etc. of the club. This will allow them to know the necessary information to order the right products, how much to order, etc. Being such a small company also benefits in the fact that the IT department can remain very small.
I believe that Club IT’s best strategy for competitive advantage would be customer orientation. Lisa and Ruben can take many different approaches that are both cost efficient as well as customer oriented. The first step would be to try to break down the different groups of their clientele. They need to discover what types of people (e.g. Singles, adults, young-adults, etc.) attend their club each night. The people who come to Club IT depend on what type of music is being played. Typically, different groups of people like different drinks and different food.
I believe an efficient way of being able to carry out this plan is to purchase some sort of ID scanner. When one enters