Information System Operational Alignment: an Alternative Towards Service Quality Improvement in the Hospitality Industry

Abstract

Since the twentieth century, a transformation has begun through two new techniques from information age: information technology (IT) and business process redesign. Considering this context, aiming to make the relationship between business process and IT tangible, this paper verifies this relationship in the hospitality industry, which is in evidence due to mega events that Brazil will receive in the next years. To conduct this research, we mapped al business processes from the case studied; analyze the support offered by the adopted information technology (IT) to the processes; verify the alignment between business processes and information system (IS) adopted and; verify users satisfaction with the utilized IS. The study is qualitative and descriptive, and the investigation method is a single case study in a hotel located in the central region of Rio Grande do Sul (RS). For the data and information collection, we used the non-participant observation and lastly, we applied a satisfaction survey with IS users. As results, we obtained the business processes mapping from the organization, the interrelationships among them and the IS adopted. We concluded that processes are aligned with IT used, since IT support the business processes. Also, we found that IS users are satisfied with the system adopted and understand that it is important for the organization performance.