Assignment 4

Question 1: (30 points)

a)  Read the Consulting Opportunity 1.1 “Healthy Hiring: Ecommerce Help Wanted” (Kendall & Kendall page 3) and answer the following question:

How important is it that the person being hired has some basic busi­ness understanding? (2 points)

*** For this question, please limit you response to a maximum of 50 words.

b)  Suppose you are evaluating two hardware lease proposals. Option 1 costs $8,000, but requires that the entire amount be paid in advance. Option 2 costs $10,500, but the payments can be made $1,500 now and $1,500 per year for the next six years. If you do a present value analysis assuming a 5 percent discount rate, which proposal is less expensive? (10 points)

*** For this question, please limit you response to a maximum of two pages.
    Justify all your numerical answers and answer all the questions using your own words.
    Show all your work, including how you found your answer (this is very important and
    essential to have your answer graded appropriately!).

c)  In the following proposed DFD design, there are some typical errors among external entities (E), processes (P) and data stores (DS). Identify and explain any errors in the following design.(8 points)

d)  You are a project manager at L & D Inc., specialized in information technology and network engineering. One of your junior systems analyst came to you for an advice of a technology to capture user information requirements. He described to you that he had talked with his client several times in the past week to define user information requirements. Each time he thought he had captured user information requirements, they’ve already changed. Finally, he thinks his clients do not even know what they want for their system.

Give your junior systems analyst an advice of a technology that he could use to capture user information requirements and explain to him how this technology can help him to better define users’ information requirements. (10 points)

*** For this question, please limit you response to a maximum of one page.

Clarification:

Students should take the word "technology" as being defined in several dictionaries as a scientific method, technique, theory, or practice to solve a practical problem. I copy here some definitions of the word "technology" that you might refer to answer your question.

1. The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives.
2. The scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective.

3. The application of practical sciences to industry or commerce.
4. The methods, theory, and practices governing such application a highly developed technology.

5. The use of scientific knowledge to solve practical problems, especially in industry & commerce.
6. The specific methods, materials, and devices used to solve practical problems.

Question 2: (15 points)

Mr. Smith, who owns a furniture company, wants to develop an information system for tracking shipments to warehouses. Using the data from the table below, please do the following:

1.  Draw a Gantt chart (learned from this course) to help Mr. Smith organize his design project. (4 points)

2.  When is it appropriate to use a Gantt chart?  What are the disadvantages?
(6 points)

3.  Drawn a PERT diagram (learned from this course) and then list all paths, calculate and identify the critical path.(5 points)

*** For this question, please limit you response to a maximum of two pages.

Question 3: (15 points)

As a system analyst of AJ Food Services company, you are responsible to build a Web-based employee benefit system that employees can use to view information regarding how much money is taken out of their paychecks for health insurance, retirement, and taxes. The system objectives and requirements are as follows:

1.  It allows employees to use a secure logon to view their employee benefit information.

2.  It interfaces with a health insurance company to obtain the amount in the employee’s account for the year.

3.  It interfaces with a retirement company to obtain retirement amounts saved along with investment results.

4.  It interfaces with the human resources tax department of AJ Food Services company to obtain information about federal and state taxes and other taxes.

5.  It requires employees to register and then give permission to obtain

a.  Financial amounts from the health insurance company and the retirement company

b.  Tax information from the human resources tax department

Create a context-level data flow diagram for the employee benefit system.

* Note that you can make any assumptions about the data to and from the central process.

*** For this question, please limit you response to a maximum of a page and a half.

Question 4: (15 points)

Draw an entity-relationship diagram (ERD) in the third normal form for a “student database record” system based on the following situation:

·      Each student may have many professors, and each professor may teach
many students.

·      A student may live in only one residence hall, but each residence hall
usually has many students.

·      Each student may register for many courses, and each course may have
many students.

Identify relationships among the diagram entities as “one-to-one” and/or “one-to-many”, if any. Identify entities as “entity” or “associative entity”. (15 points)

Question 5: (25 points)

Consider a project management system in which each employee is assigned to a specific department and employees from several departments often are assigned
to special project teams, however, when a new product is launched or for major marketing events. Note that the project hours are the number of hours that employees charge to their assigned projects. The following is an example of an
un-normalized PROJECT-DATA table for two projects.

   PROJECT-DATA

Perform the normalization process to convert the above un-normalized table to:

1. First normal form (1NF)

2. Second normal form (2NF)

3. Third normal form (3NF)

Please show all your work. Please show each step along the way and identify primary keys, if any, in each table in each step.