Technical Difficulties: EMS Crash

Technical Difficulties: EMS Crash

The Shepherd University Information Center offers many beneficial services to students, staff, and visitors and its biggest asset is the EMS software program that runs throughout the entire campus. The EMS system is a room scheduling software designed to manage the meetings and events that take place at Shepherd University. It has standard features, which allows the staff members to create, manage and report events on campus for different organizations or parties. Unfortunately, during my first week as an intern, the system crashed due to IT Department experiencing some issues with two discs and in the process of that EMS was wiped. The backup for EMS was also wiped out. So, EMS had to be rebuilt completely. Therefore, the information center did not have a system to schedule reservations. This led to the information center team coming up with a new strategy to create a procedure as far as booking reservations. Our first effort was to reschedule reservations that had already been made.  However, meanwhile we would be working with IT to recreate EMS, restore reservations that were made prior to the loss of data, and accept and add new bookings. As a result, we have been operating through a manual system while the automated system is being rebuilt. Access allowed us to store information in reference with booking reservations for our customers. This system enabled us to know what reservations that had already been confirmed in the system. Our second effort will be the acceptance of new reservations. Our scheduling strategy became “tentative” until we were able to determine that there was not a conflict with previously booked reservations.  An experience like this as an intern gives me the opportunity to test the waters of what could happen on a random day in a workplace. It is my responsibility to acquire the knowledge and the skills by experiencing circumstances such as this where strategic communication and problem solving is viable to run any well-organized organization or company. My first week as an intern, experiencing the malfunction in the workplace has taught me in abundance.