Location
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
7-1-2025 12:00 AM
End Date
10-1-2025 12:00 AM
Description
This disguised and abbreviated real discussion case is based on a small field-based study conducted in the dining services division of a large U.S. university. The case situation involves students’ use of a mobile app to order meals from the University’s dining halls. Placing their orders during morning or late-afternoon classes, students head immediately to the dining halls to pick up their lunch or dinner orders. This causes overwhelmingly long lines, which places stress on dining hall staff, who struggle to keep pace when demand surges. Students are complaining, employee turnover is rising, and the newly-appointed Dining Services Director, struggling to hire new staff and under pressure to meet his revenue goals, sees no clear path to a solution. Heartburn does not begin to describe how this manager feels. How and why has a promising digital innovation brought such pain to so many stakeholders? Every solution that the Director considers involves one or more tradeoffs; he is starving for guidance.
Recommended Citation
Chinn, David and Gogan, Janis, "Heartburn in the Dining Halls" (2025). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2025 (HICSS-58). 2.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/os/special_topics/2
Heartburn in the Dining Halls
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
This disguised and abbreviated real discussion case is based on a small field-based study conducted in the dining services division of a large U.S. university. The case situation involves students’ use of a mobile app to order meals from the University’s dining halls. Placing their orders during morning or late-afternoon classes, students head immediately to the dining halls to pick up their lunch or dinner orders. This causes overwhelmingly long lines, which places stress on dining hall staff, who struggle to keep pace when demand surges. Students are complaining, employee turnover is rising, and the newly-appointed Dining Services Director, struggling to hire new staff and under pressure to meet his revenue goals, sees no clear path to a solution. Heartburn does not begin to describe how this manager feels. How and why has a promising digital innovation brought such pain to so many stakeholders? Every solution that the Director considers involves one or more tradeoffs; he is starving for guidance.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/os/special_topics/2