ENGL2311:Discussion 5 for nyanya

Slowed to a Crawl

Alice Franklin worked for Kent Medical’s Outreach Division, which was part of a large medical services company. She worked her way up through the company as a biomedical engineer, but she jumped at the chance to work with the Outreach Division because it allowed her to work with people in other parts of the world.

Her job was to help Kent Medical deliver free medical services and supplies to people in poor countries that did not have advance medical services. She went home every night knowing she had made a difference. Plus, her trips to South America and Africa were exhilarating and fulfilling.

A few month ago, Alice’s boss, Kathryn Young, had hired Zigda Communications, a high-priced web design firm, to redesign the Outreach Division’s website. The website was a critical part of the division’s public relations efforts and fundraising. It was also the portal through which clients requested help and communicated with Kent Medical.

Zigda agreed to do the work for a fraction of their usual fee, and they did an incredible job redesigning the site. The Flash animation was amazing, and the embedded videos were very effective at telling the story of Kent Medical’s efforts to help people in other parts of the world. A week after the site went online, it was featured as a “Best Website” on a major news website. That week, the website got over 700,000 hits, more than it ever had before. Plus, the Outreach Division had already raised over $1.2 million in donations through online contributions.

However, Alice noticed a problem. The Outreach Division’s clients in South America and Africa were not accessing the site as much as they had before. Request for services and supplies had dropped off dramatically.

Trying to figure out what was happening, Alice called up one of the missing clients in Brazil. A representative explained to her that they were not able to access the website because their computers were using dial-up connections. So, all those fancy animations, video, and forms were overwhelming their computers.

Even when they could get through to a request form for medical services and supplies, the new forms were far too advanced for their browsers. Upgrading the browsers, however, would clog up their computers’ memory and cause their computers to crash.

Alice wasn’t sure what to do. Hiring Zigda had been the decision of her boss. Bringing up this problem was going to be very embarrassing because the “successful” new website was undermining their core mission of providing medical services and supplies to their clients. And yet, the website was also generating millions of dollars in new donations. How might you handle this situation if you were in Alice’s place?