NEW AGE OF BUSINESS

We are in the informative age, where daily new ideas are developed and
clever use of things are done. Business in this information age must
complete in a challenging market place – one that is rapidly changing,
complex, global, hypercompetitive, and customer focused. Every business
strives hard to get opportunities so they must quickly respond to problems
and opportunities which arrive in the business.

The business environment refers to following combination which affect the

business environments are: -

1) Legal
2) Social
3) Physical
4) Political
5) economic
The magnitude and pace of change affecting organization continue to
accelerate causing increased uncertainty in company operation and
strategies. For competitive global marketplace companies like ATST,
General electric and general motors have reconstructed their organization
by eliminating thousand of jobs.

IMPORTANCE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

All medium to large organisations depend on Information technology for their
continued survival. Consider organisations like
1) British Gas

2) British Telecom
3) Power

4) Water
Companies having to manually calculate, millions of customer bills every
month or quarter! Clearly the clerical effort involved would make it difficult if
not impossible for the organisation to make a profit. Similar arguments apply
to many other organisations such as the high street banks, central and local
government. A recent article in the Daily Telegraph IT supplement
suggested that many large organisations could last no longer than 24 hours
without IT support! There should be little wonder that attitudes to the
development of information systems have changed over the years from an
ad hoc almost cavalier approach to a professionally managed, disciplined,
planned, and engineering approach.

INFORMATION SYSTEM
An information system processes, stores, collects, analyzes and
disseminates information for a specific purpose. Like any other system an
information system includes input (data, instructions) and output (reports,
calculation). It processes the inputs and produces outputs that are seen to
the user or to other systems. A feedback mechanism that controls the
operation may be included. Like any other system, an information system
operates within an environment.

IT IN BUSINESS ORGANISATION
Information Tech has revolutionised the phase of Business around the
world. Local Businesses have become international due to a simple website.
I.T. has helped businesses in Advertising. People who check their email may
suddenly have a pop up at their page ends with sales upto 60% at JC
PENNYS!
I.T. has helped in Customer Service, huge cooperations like Microsoft attend
to customer needs through email and chat services. Networking internal and
external in organisations has improved the working of businesses. Staffs
and Clients like wise can get in touch with the MANAGERS for feedback,
progress reports and extensions.
Communication has bloomed, two business organisations if they need to
work together can easily do so. Hotmail when merged with MSN was easy
since the service was online. Business these days require a lot of planning,
due to high tech organisation systems on computers, planning can be done
 on an organised pattern, with schedule formats, gantt charts etc. Huge
databases can now be controlled and stored on network and back up drives.
Accesibility of files also has become an easy task with series of password
keys and shared folders. Cash transaction are easily made, delay in reduced
hence giving liquidity to business. By: Alwyn Thomas.
Factors Influencing the Systems Development
Effort
A variety of factors influence Information Systems Engineering, ranging from
high level strategic to detailed technical issues. The following factors are
considered, however the list is by no means exhaustive and you may well
care to add your own:-

• Strategic Information Systems Planning

• Corporate Data Management,
• Business Process Re-Engineering,
• The Technical Environment,
• Models & Methodologies,
• Socio-Behavioral Development,
• Supporting Tools,
• Quality Assurance,
• Project Management,
• Human Resources,
• End-User Systems Development.

STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEM PLANNING

Organisations typically develop rolling business plans, they are constructed
by taking into account the current business, the external influences on the
business (e.g. the economy, government policy and technological
advances), and the aims and objectives of the most senior levels of
management. The strategic business plan describes how the organisation
will strive to move from the current business to the target business.
BUSINESS PLANNING
 Information Systems support is necessary to achieve the strategic business
plan, so the business plan feeds into a Strategic Information Systems Plan
(SISP), which describes how the current IT systems are intended to evolve
into the target IT systems. A 'big bang' approach is infeasible, therefore a
project based approach is used. The output of the SISP is a series of
development projects which will either involve modifying existing systems or
developing new systems (which are likely to have to interface or integrate
with existing systems).

STRATEGIC INFORMATION PLANNING

In the past information systems were developed simply to improve the
efficiency of specific business functions. More recently information systems
have been viewed as tools for obtaining competitive advantage. Avison and
Fitzgerald (1995) have discussed the following ways in which information
systems can help to achieve competitive
Porter (1980) identifies five competitive forces that any organisation needs
to consider:-
1. Threat of new entrants.
2. Bargaining power of customers.
3. Threat of substitute products or services.
4. Bargaining power of suppliers.
5. Rivalry among existing firms.
Earl (1989) extends Porter’s work by illustrating the strategic role that
Information Technology (IT) can play in addressing these forces. The result
of Earl’s work is a ‘multiple’ methodology.
The methodology adopts a three pronged approach to strategic information
systems development: -
1) The first prong involves the top-down analysis of business objectives using
Critical Success Factors (CSF), SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and Porter’s five forces.
2) The second prong involves bottom-up analysis of existing systems.
3) The third prong emphasizes the creative use of IT.
 Bullen and Rockart (1984) have produced a strategic information systems
methodology based on CSF analysis. The methodology involves the
analysis of business goals and objectives and the factors critical to achieving
those objectives. The next stage is the identification of the information
systems required to support these CSFs.
The discussion so far has emphasized a holistic approach, looking at high
level business objectives rather than detailed functional requirements.

CORPORATE DATA MANAGEMENT

Organisations like: -
1) British Gas
2) British Telecom
3) NHS
Have come to realize that on a replacement cost basis their computerized
databases are amongst their most valuable assets (consider how much it
would cost for British Gas to recapture its customer database) and that as
such they need to be professionally managed.
These companies have realized how important data accuracy and
consistency is and have developed company systems and data
architectures. These are very high level models which describe the main
processes the organisation carries out and the main entities and
relationships required to support these business processes. The
development of application systems is constrained by the need to be
consistent with the overarching, high level, company wide view of its data.

BUSINESS PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING / PROCESS

INNOVATION

The idea of process innovation (Davenport and Short, 1990,

Davenport, 1993) is closely linked with the techniques of Business
 Process Re-engineering. The argument is that computerizing
existing systems is only likely to yield marginal gains. In many
cases the only means of achieving radical improvements is to
radically re-engineer the business process itself and use IT to
enable to re-engineered process. Process Innovation illustrates the
main argument of the paper, i.e. that an effective methodology for
ISE should adopt a rigorous, structured approach to data design
and a dynamic approach to process design.
THE TECHNICAL ENVIORMENT
A company which has made a substantial investment in ICL hardware and
the INGRES Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) does not
decide to convert to IBM and DB2 lightly, so realistically the development is
constrained by the existing technical environment.

PARADIGMS MODELS AND METHOLOGIES

STRUCTURED METHOLOGIES
The industry has realised that a standard approach using proven analysis
and design techniques should improve the ‘quality’ of systems. The standard
methodology for the development of business information systems in the UK
is Structured Systems Analysis and Design Methodology (SSADM).
However there are many other methodologies in use around the world such
as Yourdon, Gane & Sarson, Hood and Information Engineering and DSDM
(Dynamic Systems Development Methodology). A company which has
adopted SSADM has chosen to constrain its systems development activities
in a particular way.
SSADM is an example of the waterfall model of information systems
engineering. SSADM covers the Feasibility, Analysis and Design stages of
the waterfall project lifecycle
• Feasibility: Is the project likely to be cost effective?
• Analysis: What is required by the business?
• Design: How is the requirement going to be implemented?
• Software Development: Building and testing software.
• Implementation: Delivery and installation of new hardware/software
systems.
• Maintenance: The cycle continues ad infinitum at a lower level.
The whole process is circular and never ending because implemented
systems become part of the current set of IT systems which feed into the on-
going SISP exercise.
There are other non-monolithic models of information systems engineering
which are discussed at length in a paper by Graham entitled ‘Incremental
Development: review of non-monolithic life cycle development models’
(Graham, 1989).

OBJECT ORIENTATION
In this approach information systems can be viewed as networks of objects,
communicating with each other via messages. An object consists of data
attributes and a set of methods which enable objects to be created, updated
queried and deleted. One of the objectives of object orientation is software
re-use. The idea is that all the processing complexities are encapsulated
within the object. In this scenario information systems can be engineered
from existing objects.
RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
RAD (Rapid Application Development, Martin, 1991) approaches began to
be adopted in the late 80’s and are based on a number of fundamental
premises, the most important being the acceptance that business
processing requirements will inevitably change during the development cycle
of a system. In order to work with this fact of systems development life the
RAD approach mandates:-
• the use of 4th Generation Tools (to enable quick delivery);
• an iterative model of systems development which allows backtracking in the
light of changing requirements;
• the use of evolutionary prototypes (SSADM adopts the adage that a picture
is worth a thousand words, RAD goes a step further and advocates that a
working model is worth a thousand pictures);
• a very high level of user involvement in the development process to aid in
communications and to encourage feelings of commitment and ownership;
• The empowerment of highly skilled, multi-disciplinary teams consisting of
users, analysts and technical specialists.
SOCIAL- BEHAVIOURAL DEVELOPMENT
• ETHICS : (Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer-
Based Systems, Mumford, 1995). ETHICS is based on an explicitly stated
philosophy. The philosophy views ISE as an organisational issue concerned
with the process of change. The methodology adopts a socio-technical
approach taken from the field of Sociology
• Participatory Development : (PD, Floyd et al 1989), PD is a
philosophy for the analysis, design and implementation of computer
systems, rather than a specific methodology. PD has been called the
Scandinavian approach. The approach stems from the underlying nature of
Scandinavian culture.
"An essential feature in Scandinavia is, above all, what appears to outsiders
as a far reaching and widely supported fundamental concern with the
building and development of a society in which each individual may live in
dignity and in conditions conducive to personal development.....an
egalitarian society."
The natural result of the application of this philosophy of life to the
development of computer systems is that humanization and democratization
become overriding design goals.
• SSM : (Soft Systems Methodology, Checkland, 1981, Checkland and
Scholes, 1990). SSM involves the use of rich pictures and root definitions to
assess the problem situation in all its political glory, showing the different
viewpoints and the conflicts these cause.
• ISAC : (Information Systems Work and Analysis of Change, Lundeberg et
al, 1982). ISAC views an information system as organised co-operation
between people in order to process and convey information to each other.
• MULTIVIEW : (Avison and Wood-Harper, 1990). Multiview is a hybrid
methodology which is based on the work of Checkland (SSM) and Mumford
(ETHICS) but has integrated techniques from structured methodologies such
as STRADIS.

SUPORTING TOOLS
Standard tools are likely to be used, e.g. Case tools, data dictionaries,
analyst workbenches and 4th Generation Environments (4GE). These are
often linked with methodologies, e.g. the PC/Select Case product has add-
on toolkits for SSADM and Yourdon. Again organisations using these tools
are choosing to constrain their systems development process.
QUALITY ASSURANCE
Quality may seem to the current buzzword, however many organisations
take quality very seriously and have instigated quality improvement
programs which involve the use of informal/semi-formal walkthroughs and
formal inspections and reviews. These quality control mechanisms can be
applied at every phase of the systems development lifecycle including
Strategic Information Systems Planning.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Everyone has heard of spectacular overruns in terms of time and budgets
for computer projects. In an attempt to overcome these problems many
organisations have adopted formal, structured (or semi-structured) project
management techniques, examples are ‘PRINCE’ (Bentley, Introducing
PRINCE - the structured project management method). These techniques
are frequently integrated with the methodology in use and have their own
supporting tools, e.g. PMW (Project Managers Workbench from the Hoskins
Company) and ‘Microsoft Project’.
RESOUCE CONSTRAINTS
Last but by no means least, the availability of suitable staff, money and time
provide the most obvious constraints on the systems development process.
END USER DEVELOPMENT
In this approach end-users develop their own systems using a variety of
user-friendly application development packages such as PC databases and
spreadsheets.