Download thesis - Kjeld Schmidt

The danish youth travel agency “Viby Ungdomsrejser” is a thriving company
with an average of more than 400 customers every week, during the six
week long danish summer holiday period. Since a vital part of their revenue
comes from selling different products at the destination - mainly excursions
of various sorts - it is important that they have some sort of system that
can manage this part of the business. Today they use a mobile paperbased
system which they have developed over the years, but the physical nature
of the system gives the working staff on the destination some problems.
Problems that can be solved if they could get a new IT-based system.
Hence, on the basis of the case in picture, this thesis tries to give a solution
to a conceptual design for such a system. A system that is mobile and at the
same time makes the need for paper handling absolete. In order to make
sure that our solution is designed to support this specific field of work, we
examine what kind of work practice we are dealing with. That is, we don’t
just want to give a solution to the experienced problems in isolation from
their social context. We want to make sure that the new system is adapted
properly in to the daily use and work practice.
When we apply technology to a specific field of work, the technology has
to be designed to support the apparent needs properly. But the new
possibilites of the technology can also inspire to augment the existing field
of work, and expand it to new areas, not achievable before. In this manner,
we have invisioned the need for gathering data regarding the different sales.
This way the management is able to optimize the allocation of their sales
ressources, based on results from data analysis. What is special about this
case is that both customers and vendors are mobile. It is not possible to
connect a physical or symbolic place to a specific transaction. To overcome
this, we have integrated a functionality that, with the help of positioning
technology, gathers the time and physical location of every transaction.
Abstract
Abstract
Det mobile billetsalgssystem- et konceptuelt designfor slag 1
Since the physical location (coordinates) in itself isn’t enough to describe
a sale situation, we need to augment the definition of location to include
the symbolic abstractions, which are vital for describing the sales-work at
the destination. That is, we need to map some relevant meaning onto the
physical information.
After the right information has been stored in a database, we need to adapt
some sort of analysis methodology, that effectively can handle the gathered
information. We suggest the use of data mining, a term for specific methods
that can create meaning out of big piles of seamingly meaningless data.
We also argue that this is the proper methodology for handling the analysis
functionality.