Themes in information system development

Credit Assignment

By

MUHAMMAD BILAL 18 BBA 001

Business Administration (Management information system)

Under the supervision of

SIR MANZAR BASHIR

SBBU Business Administration

SHAHEED BENAZIR BHUTTO UNIVERSITY, SANGHAR CAMPUS

Date of the submission

25–OCT– 2020
 Themes in information system development

Organizational themes in ISD

 System theory
 Strategic information system
 Business process re-engineering (BPR)
 Information systems planning
 Organizational culture
 Organizational change

 System theory

System theory is recognizing that all human activity systems are open system; therefore, they are
affected by the environment in which they exist. System theory recognize that in complex system
events are separated by distance and time; therefore, small catalytic events can cause large
changes in the system. System theory acknowledges that a change in one area of a system can
adversely affect another area of the system; thus, it promotes organizational communication at all
levels in order to avoid limited effect.

 Strategic information system

Strategic information system is computerization focused on basic transaction processing: cost

savings quantifiable, perform same processing more efficiently. Limitations of further efficiency
gains: opportunities unlikely to demonstrate these types of savings. Emergence of an additional
role for information systems and IT: strategic information is use to improve the business in
market place.

Competitive advantages

 Redefine the boundaries of specific industries

 Develop new products and services
 Change the relationship between customers and suppliers
 Establish barriers to determined new entrants to the market place
Business process re-engineering

It is an opportunity to re-engineer business processes which is enabled by technology. Business

process re-engineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes
to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, modern measures of performance, such as cost,
quality, service, and speed. What an organization should do, how it should do it, what its
concerns should be, not what they currently are business process re-engineering(BPR).

Motivations for re-engineering

 Facing several commercial pressures and have no choice.

 Competitive forces require re-aligning business processes with strategic positioning.
 Organization management see re-engineering as an opportunity to streamline and to
overtake their competitors.
 Publicity about BPR has prompted organizations to follow the lead established by others.

Outcomes of BPR

 Flatter organization.
 Greater focus on customers.
 Improved teamwork, better understanding of the roles of others.

Information systems planning

The planning required to develop an organizations information systems. Organization’s top

management involved the organizations objectives. Plan for the usage of information system to
achieve the business objectives and avoiding partial approach to develop information system.
Adjust information system with the business and planning at three levels: long term, medium
term, short term.

Organization culture

The system of shared beliefs and values that develops within an organization and guides the
behavior of its members is called organization culture. Organization culture influence the
performance of an organization and working quality of its members. There are three levels of
culture in organizations: observable culture, shared values, common assumptions
Observable culture

 The way to do things here.

 Methods the group has developed and imparts to new members.
 Stories, ceremonies, corporate rituals; define meanings and roles e.g. founding stories,
heroic sagas, success stories: convey “hidden” information define group identity

Shared values

A dominant and coherent set of values shared by a group as a whole: links people together, a
motivational mechanism for members of the organization.

e.g. quality, customer service

Common assumptions

Taken for granted truths that members share as a basis of their collective experience.

e.g. background influence of national cultures

Organizational change

Introducing and managing organization change for new information systems and new
information technology. For system development new system development methodologies,
technologies and techniques. Organizational change effect user perspective, organizational
performance such as efficiency and change in quality of work life.

Peoples themes in ISD

 Participation
 End-user computing
 Expert systems
 Knowledge management
 Customer orientation
 Requirements

Participation
Involving all those affected by information systems in the process of developing them is known
as participation. The people concerned in the development of an IS are: users and other
stakeholders (computer professionals, system analysts).

Levels of participation

There are three levels of participation.

 Consultative participation

All users are consulted about contribute ideas to the design process but the design task is carried
out by systems analysts.

 Representative participation

Design groups formed from elected or selected representatives, who take design decisions.

 Consensus participation

Design group members constantly discuss ideas and solutions with all users.

User participation benefit

Improved system quality:

 More complete, accurate requirement.

 Provides expertise about the organization.
 Avoids development of unacceptable or unimportant features.
 Improves user understanding of the system.

Increased user acceptance:

 Realistic expectations.
 Settlement of conflict resolution.
 Users more committed to the system.
 Decreased user resistance.

End-user computing
It is participative approach whereby the users are not specialists that’s why they develop their
own information system. This enabled by PCs and application packages for non –IT peoples (e.g.
spreadsheets, database, visual BASIC etc.) users in business organizations are able to build their
own business applications either stand alone or integrated with organizational systems. Some
identified types are: non-programming end users, command-level users, end-user programmers,
functional support personnel.

Results in user satisfaction:

 Needs unlikely to be satisfied by IT departments.

 Some pressure off IT department.
 End-users close to the business problems.
 System costed within user department budgets.

Expert system
Expert system is an intelligent computer program that uses knowledge and inference procedures
to solve problems that are difficult enough to require significant human expertise for their
solution. Expert systems are essentially artificial intelligence programs that contain in some way
and some of the knowledge that human specialists have. They contain a model of the experts
own model of the domain.

Components of ES

 Knowledgebase
 Frames
 Inference engine
 Language
 Shell
 Explanation generator
 Blackboard
 User interface
 Environment

Knowledge management
Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, expert insight
and grounded awareness that provides an environment and framework for evaluating and
combining new experiences and information. It creates and is applied in the minds of knowers.
In organizations it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in
organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms.

Key drivers for knowledge management

 Knowledge centric drivers

 Technology drivers
 Organizational structure-based drivers
 Personnel drivers
 Process-focused drivers
 Economic drivers

Customer orientation
Customer relationship management(CRM) is concerned with using IT to attract valuable
customer’s in the first place and keeping them loyal to the company.

Functional vs non-functional requirements

Functional requirement captures the functions that a system must perform while non-functional
requirements capture general properties about the system such as its speed, usability, safety,
reliability, and so on. Nonfunctional requirements are often also called system qualities.

Requirements

 According to information systems, requirements are everything that relevant stakeholders

want from a system.
 Relevant stakeholders are all those people involved in the system including both internal
and external to the organization. E.g.: users, end-user, senior management, customers.
 Requirement are considered an ongoing problem area due to the issues associated with
requirements identifying, gathering, analyzing, documenting and communicating.

Requirement problems
  Some requirement problems are: incorrect requirements, changes to requirements,
misunderstood requirements
 Finding and fixing a software problem after delivery is 100 times more expensive than
finding and fixing it during the requirements and early design phases.

Modelling themes in ISD

 Modelling
 Process modelling
 Data modelling
 Object modelling

Modelling

Modelling consists of building an abstraction of reality. An abstractions are simplifications

because they ignore irrelevant details and they only represent the relevant details. Hence
modelling is relevant abstraction and representation of reality as well as mastering complexity.
An analyst will create diagrammatic models of a target or proposed system in order to
understand the system and communicate to demonstrate or clarify, understanding of the existing
system and obtain feedback from users or clients. To describe unambiguously the proposed
computer system to users or client and to the programming team.

Process modelling

Process modelling is a technique for organizing and documenting the structure and flow of data
through a systems processes or the logic policies, and procedures to be implemented by a
systems processes. Process modelling originated in classical software engineering methods. The
basic technique of process modelling is functional decomposition, that is the breaking down of
complex problem into more and more detail in a disciplined way.

Data modelling

Data modelling is the analysis and design of the information in the system, concentrating on the
logical entities and the logical dependencies between these entities. It is a model which is readily
understandable by both developers and users because of its graphical form. It is independent of
any physical implementation i.e. it is at a logical level. It does not show bias towards particular
users or departmental views the data model can reflect a variety of different views of the data.

Object modelling

Object-oriented concepts unify many aspects of the information system development process it
represents data, processes, people and so on all as object. It facilitates the realistic re-use of
software code and therefore makes application development quicker and more strong. It
integrates methods of system development with the system context. Object modelling helps to
represent reality in form of object, interactions etc.

Rapid and evolutionary development themes in ISD

 Evolutionary development
 Prototyping
 Rapid application development(RAD)
 Agile development
 Web-based development

Evolutionary development

Evolutionary development is an incremental approach that periodically delivers a system that is

increasingly complete (i.e. it evolves) over time. In this approach development is organized into
a series of short, fixed-length (for example three-week) mini-projects called iterations the
outcome of each is a tested, integrated, and executable partial system. Each iteration includes its
own requirements analysis, design, implementation, and testing activities. The first
implementation is not seen as an objective but is just part of the continuing evolution until the
optimal solution is reached.

Evolutionary development advantages

 The first implementation can be relatively quick; it will be probably delivered more
quickly than a full system.
 Changing requirements over time are expected.
  Highly appropriate for situations where requirements are difficult to discover or with
complex systems.

Prototyping

Prototyping is an approximation of the information system to be built. Developers can design

and build a scaled-down functional model of the desired system and then demonstrate this to the
users to gain feedback. There are two types of prototyping: a throwaway prototype, an
evolutionary prototype.

A throwaway prototype

 Used solely to help establish and elicit the user requirements.

 It focusses on quickly building graphical interfaces and some basic processing and
functionality.

An evolutionary prototype

 Evolved or enhanced to form the actual system that will be provided to the user for real
use.
 An evolutionary prototype tools leads to slightly quicker applications development as
developers are building on something that already exists rather than starting from scratch.

Rapid application development (RAD)

Rapid application development is a process through which the development cycle of an

application is accelerated and follows principles and uses techniques including incremental
development, time boxing, Moscow rules, JAD workshops, prototyping and toolsets to achieve
speedier development.

RAD Aspects

Rapid application development has four essential aspects:

 Methodology
 People
 Management
 Tools computer aided systems engineering (CASE) tools.
Agile development

Agile development approach aims at flexible and quick development of software, even where
requirements are difficult to define. It emphasizes interactions between people, developing
software with less emphasis on documentation, collaborating with customers and responding to
change in the development process. Agile development is an umbrella term used to describe a
specific group of methodologies that arose out of a growing discontent with the way software
development has been approached for the past 30 years. It emphasizes interactions between
people, developing software with less documentation and collaborating with customers and
responding to change in the development process.

Web-based development

Web-based development is another application type but it does have some particular emphases
including time pressures, design and user interface requirements, security concerns and customer
orientation. Web-based information system distributes information as well as proactively
interacts with users and processes their business tasks to achieve their business goals.

Types of web-based information system

 Intranets: it supports internal work, web-presence sites that are marketing tools designed
to reach consumers outside the firm.
 Electronic commerce: systems that support consumer interactions, such as online
shopping.
 Extranet: a blend of internal and external systems to support business-to-business
communication.

Engineering themes in ISD

 Legacy systems
 Software engineering
 Automated tools
 Method engineering (ME)
 Component development
  Security issues
 Database engineering
 Data warehouse and data mining

Legacy systems

Legacy systems are systems that have been in operation for some time. They may well perform
critical processes, but they are often seen as a problem as they may have high maintenance costs
use obsolete hardware and software be poorly documented and lack of support people with the
knowledge required to maintain them.

Software engineering

Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the

development, operation, and maintenance of software that is the application of engineering to
software. A software engineering project involves people guided by common goals and strategies
working with a collection of tools to produce documents and code. Documents provide
requirements that define the problem, customer manuals, test plans, scenarios, a design that
defines the architecture, and implementation plans. The code may deal with objects, data
structures, algorithms, methods, modules, protocols, and interface definitions.

Automated tools

Automated tools include compilers, debuggers, environments, change management, source

control, project management, document processors, and domain modeling tools. There are four
fundamental phases in most, if not all software engineering methodologies. These phases are
analysis, design, implementation, and testing. These phases address what is to be built, how it
will be built, building it, and making it high quality.

Method engineering (ME)

Method engineering is the process of designing, constructing and merging methods and
techniques to support ISs development. It might be blending of methods and techniques into
framework, methodology or mega-methodology. Its most recent form is enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems, which are combinations of application types rather than methods and
techniques.
Component development

Information system can be developed from components that include drivers, internet utilities,
software development, software security and database components. CBSE (component –based
software engineering) represent a paradigm shift in software development: from building
monolithic, single-platform, purpose-built from scratch systems to constructing assemblies of
ready-made components that are platform independent and supplied by third parties.

Security issues

Security issues are important in all of IS development and operational systems. Breaches of
security can be both malicious and non-malicious, but in either case they need to be prevented if
possible and detected quickly.

Database engineering

A database is an organized and integrated collection of data. A DBMS is software that validates
store, secures, displays and prints the data in ways that users require. Database engineering is
technologies, theories, models, techniques, methods and tools dedicated to specifying, modeling,
designing, implementing, optimizing databases, extracting, migrating, web-publishing data from
a database. Reverse engineering legacy databases maintaining, reengineering, evolving,
migrating existing databases, federating, wrapping, mediating a set of independent databases.

Data warehouses and data mining

Data warehouses are large collections of related and unrelated data and data mining attempts to
identify business trends or improve CRM (customer relationship management) using software
tools.

External development themes in ISD

 Application packages
 Open source software (OSS)
 Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
  Outsourcing and offshoring

Application packages

An application package is a ready-made IS. Being developed externally the package may need to
be customized / tailored for the company. Customization is the summary of how, what, when,
and who with respect to customization. Developing question in customization for evaluating
application packages.

Open source software (OSS)

Open source software is software for which the underlying programming code is available to the
users so that they may read it make changes to it and build new versions of the software
including their changes. Open-source software is built and enhanced through public
collaboration. Linux besides, Mozilla (Netscape browser core), apache (web server), Perl (web
scripting language) and PNG (graphics file format) are all examples of very popular software
that is based on open source.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

Enterprise resource planning systems are application packages, but they are integrated systems,
transferring information throughout the supply chain. ERP systems form a complex series of
software modules used to integrate many business processes. Suppliers of ERP systems: SAP,
Oracle, Baan, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft.

Outsourcing and offshoring

Outsourcing is the commissioning of a third party (or a number of third parties) to manage a
client organizations IT assets, people and activities to a defined specification or service level.
Offshore outsourcing (offshoring) occurs when the work is carried out overseas, possibly where
costs are reduced.