software solution

Management Information Systems – Week 7 Lecture 1

Investigation & Analysis Chapter 12 Systems Development: Investigation and Analysis Businesses use systems and employees become knowledge workers as they perfect using these systems but how are these systems developed? In this unit you will see how a software application is developed, do not worry, all the technical part has been left out. These are the basic concepts of how systems are developed, it is mostly research and project management.

Some of the participants in Systems Development are: Development team – programmers that do the program writing, testers, quality assurance analysts, database analysts, network engineers and other folks such as system analysts that perform technical tasks

Project Manager – a person skilled in the area of maintaining focus of the development team and users, to keep everyone on track

Stakeholders – users, the departments that depend on the project result Information systems planning is critical to the success of a project developing systems software. It is critical that the planning aligns corporate and IS goals. One of the main purpose to creating software is to develop a competitive advantage. If a business can create a quality product at a faster pace than a competitor, they will win the vote of the consumer. There are many Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that are monitored during the development cycle. There are several approaches to what is called the Systems Development Life Cycle. Here are few:

Traditional Systems Development Life Cycle Systems investigation

Systems analysis

Systems design

Systems implementation

Systems maintenance and review

Prototyping both operational prototype and nonoperational prototype Rapid application development (RAD) – where individuals work on several pieces of the project at once in order to deliver small functional units to the user (as compared to building the entire project and delivering at one time).

Additional considerations in software development are outsourcing, on-demand computing and cloud computing. Outsourcing may be a way to save money, on-demand may mean hiring consultants to build applications that your business needs, cloud computing is a great way for remote workers to collaborate and share files on the internet (cloud).

There are many factors that affecting systems development success such as the degree of the change. Training and planning will help with the implementation of new systems. A Business owner cannot understate the importance of planning especially for larger projects or it will surely fail.

Project management tools exist that use many terms, here are a few: Project schedule – a plan of what will happen when. Project milestone – a point of time at which a certain thing is planned to happen Project deadline – a (usually firm) date of when something must happen. Critical path – the series of events that must happen in a certain order that will determine the delivery date of the project.

Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) – a specific type of diagram that helps control the development process

Gantt chart – a different type of chart diagram that controls the development process Systems investigation or systems analysis is an organized approach to getting the ball rolling on a project. Some key activities are:

Gathering data on existing system

Determining requirements for new system

Considering alternatives

Investigating feasibility of solutions

Each of these activities should be broken into many parts, for example the feasibility analysis can be broken into:

Technical feasibility

Economic feasibility

Legal feasibility

Operational feasibility

Schedule feasibility

Systems analysis is a key part of the success of the project development life cycle. Think of it as doing your homework before writing a paper. You have to do your research before you can write a research paper. The first step of doing a project is to do the requirements gathering to determine if the project is important enough to continue. From a business point of view, a project is often deemed to be important enough to continue if it will make money for the company.