CASE Description

Martin was very impressed with your project plan and has given you the go ahead for the project.
He also indicates to you that he has e-mails from several key staff members that should
help with the design of the system. The first is from Alex Martin (administrative assistant to Pat
Smith, an artist manager). Pat is on vacation and Martin has promised that Pat’s perspective
will be provided at a later date. The other two are from Dale Dylan, an artist that Pat manages,
and Sandy Wallis, an event organizer. The text of these e-mails is provided below.

E-mail from Alex Martin, administrative assistant

My name is Alex Martin, and I am the administrative assistant to Pat Smith. While Pat’s role is to
create and maintain relationships with our clients and the event organizers, I am responsible for
running the show at the operational level. I take care of Pat’s phone calls while Pat is on the road,
respond to inquiries and relay the urgent ones to Pat, write letters to organizers and artists, collect
information on prospective artists, send bills to the event organizers and make sure that they pay
their bills, take care of the artist accounts, and arrange Pat’s travel (and keep track of travel
costs). Most of my work I manage with Word and simple Excel spreadsheets, but it would be
very useful to be able to have a system that would help me to keep track of the event fees that
have been agreed upon, the events that have been successfully completed, cancellations (in the
current system, I sometimes don’t get information about a cancellation and I end up sending an
invoice for a cancelled concert—pretty embarrassing), payments that need to be made to the
artists, etc. Pat and other managers seem to think that it would be a good idea if they
could better track their travel costs and the impact these costs have on their income.
We don’t have a very good system for managing our artist accounts because we have separate
spreadsheets for keeping track of a particular artist’s fees earned and the expenses incurred,
and then at the end of each month we manually create a simple statement for each of the artists.
This is a lot of work, and it would make much more sense to have a computer system that would
allow us to be able to keep the books constantly up to date. A big thing for me is to keep track of
the artists whom Pat manages. We need to keep in our databases plenty of information on them—
their name, gender, address (including country, as they live all over the world), phone number(s),
instrument(s), e-mail, etc. We also try to keep track of how they are doing in terms of the reviews
they get, and thus we are subscribing to a clipping service that provides us articles
on the artists whom we manage. For some of the artists, the amount of material we get is huge,
and we would like to reduce it somehow. At any rate, we would at least like to be
able to have a better idea of what we have in our archives on a particular artist, and thus we
should probably start to maintain some kind of a list of the news items we have for a particular
artist. I don’t know if this is worth it but it would be very useful if we could get it done.

Scheduling is, of course, a major headache for me. Although Pat and the artists negotiate the
final schedules, I do, in practice, at this point maintain a big schedule book for each artist whom
we manage. You know, somebody has to have the central copy. This means that Pat, the artists,
and the event organizers are calling me all the time to verify the current situation and make
changes to the schedule. Sometimes things get mixed up and we don’t get the latest changes to
the central calendar (for example, an artist schedules a vacation and forgets to tell us—as you can
understand, this can lead to a pretty difficult situation). It would be so wonderful to get a
centralized calendar which both Pat and the artists could access; it is probably, however, better if
Pat (and the other managers for the other artists, of course) was the only person in addition to me
who had the right to change the calendar. Hmmm . . . I guess it would be good if the artists could
block time out if they decide that they need if for personal purposes (they are not, however,
allowed to book any performances without discussing it first with us). One more thing: I would
need to have something that would remind me of the upcoming changes in artist contracts. Every
artist’s contract has to be renewed annually, and sometimes I forget to remind Pat to do this with
the artist. Normally this is not a big deal, but occasionally we have had a situation where the lack
of a valid contract led to unfortunate and unnecessary problems. It seems that we would need to
maintain some type of list of the contracts with their start dates, end dates, royalty percentages,
and simple notes related to each of the contracts. This is a pretty hectic job, and I have not had
time to get as good computer training as I would have wanted. I think I am still doing pretty well.
It is very important that whatever you develop for us, it has to be easy to use because we are in
such a hurry all the time and we cannot spend much time learning complex commands.

E-mail from Dale Dylan, established artist

Hi! I am Dale Dylan, a pianist from Austin, TX. I have achieved reasonable success during my
career and I am very thankful that I have been able to work with Pat Smith and Mr. Forondo
during the past five years. They have been very good at finding suitable performance
opportunities for me, particularly after I won an international piano competition in Amsterdam a
few years ago. Compared to some other people with whom I have worked, Pat is very
conscientious and works hard for me. During the recent months, FAME and its managers’ client
base has grown quite a lot, and unfortunately I have seen this in the service they have been able
to provide to me. I know that Pat and Alex don’t mean any harm but it seems that they simply
have too much to do, particularly in scheduling and getting my fees to me. Sometimes things
seem to get lost pretty easily these days, and occasionally I have been waiting for my
money for 2–3 months. This was never the case earlier but it has been pretty typical during the
last year or so. Please don’t say anything to Pat or Alex about this; I don’t want to hurt their
feelings, but it just simply seems that they have too much to do. Do you think your new system
could help them?

What I would like to see in a new system—if you will develop one for them—are just simple
facilities that would
help them do even better what they have always done pretty well (except very recently):
collecting money from the concert organizers and getting it to me fast (they are, after all, taking
20 percent of my money—at least they should get the rest of it to me quickly) and maintaining
my schedule. I have either a laptop or at least my smartphone/iPad with me all the time while I
am on the road, thus I certainly should be able to check my schedule on the Web. Now I always
need to call Alex to get any last-minute changes. It seems pretty silly that Pat has to be in touch
with Alex before any changes can be made to the calendar; I feel that I should be allowed to
make my own changes.
Naturally, I would always notify Pat about anything that changes (or maybe the system could do
that for me). The calendar system should be able to give me at least a simple list of the coming
events in the chronological order for any time period I want. Furthermore, I would like to be able
to search for events using specific criteria (location, type, etc.). In addition, we do, of course, get
annual summaries from FAME regarding the fees we have earned, but it would be nice to have
this information a bit more often. I don’t need it on paper but if I could access that information
on the Web, it would be very, very good. It seems to me that Alex is doing a lot of work with
these reports by hand; if you could help her with any of the routine work she is doing, I am sure
she would be quite happy. Maybe then she and Pat would have more time for getting everything
done as they always did earlier.

Email from sandy Wallis, event Organizer

I am Sandy Wallis, the executive director of the Greater Tri-State Area Concert Halls, and it has
been a pleasure to have a good working relationship with Pat Smith at FAME for many years. Pat
has provided me and my annual concert series several excellent artists per year, and I believe that
our cooperation has a potential to continue into the foreseeable future. This does, however,
require that Pat is able to continue to give me the best service in the industry during the years to
come. Our business is largely based on personal trust, and the most important aspect of our
cooperation is that I can know that I can rely on the artists managed by Pat. I am not interested in
the technology Pat is using, but it is important for us that practical matters such as billing and
scheduling work smoothly and that technology does not prevent us from making decisions fast, if
necessary. We don’t want to be billed for events that were cancelled and never rescheduled, and
we are quite unhappy if we need to spend our time on these types of technicalities. At times, we
need a replacement artist to substitute for a musician who becomes ill or cancels for some other
reason, and the faster we can get information about the availability of world-class performers in
these situations, the better it is for us. Yes, we work in these situations directly with Pat, but we
have seen that occasionally all the information required for fast decision making is not readily
available, and this is something that is difficult for us to understand. We would like to be able to
assume that Pat’s able assistant Alex should be able to give us information regarding the
availability of a certain artist on a certain date on the phone without any problems. Couldn’t this
information be available on the Web, too? Of course, we don’t want anybody to know in advance
whom we have booked before we announce our annual program; therefore, security is very
important for us. I hope you understand that we run multiple venues but we definitely still want
to be treated as one customer. With some agencies we have seen silly problems that have forced
them to send us invoices with several different names and customer numbers, which does not
make any sense from our perspective and causes practical problems with our systems.
Project Questions

2-59. Redo the enterprise data model you created in Chapter 1 to accommodate the information
gleaned from Alex
Martin, Dale Dylan, and Sandy Wallis’ e-mails.

2-60. Create an E-R diagram for FAME based on the enterprise data model you developed in 1-
52. Clearly state any
assumptions you made in developing the diagram.

2-61. Use the narratives in Chapter 1 and above to identify the typical outputs (reports and
displays) the various stakeholders might want to retrieve from your database. Now, revisit the E-
R diagram you created in 2-60 to ensure
that your model has captured the information necessary to generate the outputs desired. Update
your E-R diagram
as necessary.

2-62. Prepare a list of questions that you have as a result of your E-R modeling efforts, and that
need to be answered
to clarify your understanding of FAME’s business rules and data requirements.