MIS-CH13: Building Information Systems

Editor's Notes

• #3: This chapter discusses the kinds of organizational changes that result from the implementation of new information systems, the activities involved in systems development, and the various methodologies used to build information systems. Ask students to give their first impressions on how a new information system could produce organizational change. Give an example of a type of business and a new system, for example, a business that introduces an automated call-answering system to direct sales and technical inquiries to the right department. Ask students to discuss what types of organizational change this might bring about.
• #5: This slide discusses the first two of four different types of organizational change that information systems can enable. You can ask students to give examples of each type of change within the context of an example of a business, for example, a pizza chain. Ask students to define TQM (makes achieving quality an end in itself) and six sigma (specific measure of quality—3.4 defects per million). Ask students to evaluate the two methods. Would one be better in some industries or types of businesses over the other method? Which method would be better for a restaurant chain? Which would be better for a clothing manufacturer? Why?
• #6: This slide discusses the third and fourth types of organizational change that information systems can enable. You can ask students to give examples of each type of change within the context of an example of a business, for example, a pizza chain. Or, you can provide examples of change, and ask students to determine what category that change falls into. For example, what type of organizational change is involved when a business implements its first accounting software? For business process redesign, the text gives the example of Ford Motor Company which redesigned its accounts payable process so that vendors no longer needed to send invoices which then needed to be reconciled with purchase orders—instead, purchase orders are entered directly into the system. An example of a paradigm shift is Schneider National which changed its business model from being a long-haul trucking and transportation firm to using its information systems to manage logistics for other companies.
• #7: This graphic illustrates the four types of change, identifying them according to the potential return on investment as well as level of risk. What makes automation a low risk? What makes a paradigm shift or redesign a high risk? It is important to note that BPR and paradigm shifts have high failure rates. Ask the students why this is so. (Organizational change is difficult to orchestrate.)
• #8: This slide emphasizes business process management, a category of tools and techniques that help firms redesign business processes, the riskiness of business process reengineering, and the need to properly manage it in order for BPR to be effective. Ask students what the importance is of each step. For example, why is it important to determine the right business process to change rather than all business processes (some processes may not yield time or cost savings, you could spend too much money trying to improve all processes, and some processes may already be effective). Give students an example of a business process and ask how the process could be measured. For example, how would you measure the business process of a customer ordering a meal? Of a kitchen preparing and delivering that meal? What about the business process of hiring a new employee? It is important to note that, even with effective process redesign, a majority of reengineering projects do not achieve breakthrough gains because of inadequate change management.
• #9: This slide’s graphic illustrates the process of purchasing a book prior to reengineering, including the steps if a book is not available. It emphasizes the sequential nature of the task. Besides the time taken for this process, what are other disadvantages of this traditional business process?
• #10: This graphic illustrates the book purchasing process after reengineering as an online process. The new process and technology has reduced numerous stages to four or five. What are the elements that have allowed these steps to occur? Which of the four types of organizational change described earlier does this redesigned process most closely resemble—automation, rationalization, redesign, paradigm shift?
• #11: This slide gives an overview of the various types of BPM tools that firms use to redesign business processes. The text discusses the example of American National Insurance Company, which used Pegasystems BPM workflow software to streamline customer service processes across four business groups. BPM built rules to guide service reps through a single view of customer information across multiple systems, eliminating the need to access multiple applications when handling customer requests. This increased workload capacity of the representatives by 192 percent.
• #13: This slide and the following slides discuss the activities involved in system development—the creation of a new (or improvements to an existing) information system. The activities listed are performed in order—the first two, systems analysis and systems design, are preparatory steps for the system. The last four steps translate the design of the system into actuality. It is important to emphasize that an information system is not technology for technology’s sake, it is a solution to a problem or set of problems the organization perceives it is facing—including the problem of an opportunity that requires the use of information systems in order to undertake. What problems with business processes have students encountered or witnessed in their work or educational career that could have been improved with the help of a new or improved information system?
• #14: This graphic illustrates the six core activities of systems building. Ask students why these activities are represented as a circle. The circular nature indicates that systems building is not a linear process that is finished once the system is built. Typically, additional changes and improvements will need to be made to the system or part of the system that will require additional analysis, design, programming, testing, conversion, and maintenance.
• #15: This slide and the next describe the first stage of systems development, systems analysis. The systems analyst first creates a road map of the existing organization and systems. What does this road map consist of? (Identifying primary owners and users of data along with existing hardware and software.) What constitutes a primary owner of data? Ask students how an analyst would determine if a problem existed with existing systems. (He/she would examine documents, work papers, procedures, observe system operations, and interview key users as well as managers.) What does it mean that a solution is feasible from a financial standpoint? A technical standpoint? An organizational standpoint?
• #16: This slide continues the discussion about the first stage in systems development, systems analysis. Establishing information requirements is an essential part of analysis. A system designed around the wrong set of requirements will either have to be discarded because of poor performance or will need to undergo major modifications. As the text discusses later in the chapter, user involvement is essential for gathering requirements. Why is this so? If user involvement is central to gathering information requirements, why should technical specialists, such as systems analysts, also be involved in this process?
• #17: This slide describes the second stage of systems development, systems design. The text explains that like houses or buildings, information systems may have many possible designs. Each design represents a unique blend of all technical and organizational components. What makes one design superior to others is the ease and efficiency with which it fulfills user requirements within a specific set of technical, organizational, financial, and time constraints. Given an identical systems analysis, what elements might be different in a system design created by two different systems designers?
• #18: This slide lists the various types of specifications that must be detailed and described in a systems design. From this it is easy to see how complex designing a system can be, and how many opportunities there are for mistakes to creep in. Problems in any one of these areas could produce a less-than optimal system and losses in efficiency and productivity. Select a few of the specifications here and ask students what types of problems could result from an inadequate definition of that specification.
• #19: This slide describes the third and fourth stages of systems development, programming and testing. Many companies today do not perform their own programming, but purchase software or outsource programming to a vendor. In outsourcing, who would be responsible for the testing, the vendor or the purchasing company? Would any testing be needed when software is purchased as a package? It is important to note that the importance of testing is typically underrated in systems project planning, and the risks resulting from inadequate testing are enormous. Ask students why, if system testing is performed that checks the entire system, would unit testing be important.
• #20: This graphic illustrates a portion of a test plan. Ask students to describe what the columns of this table mean. It looks at six different possible situations, given a user of the system attempting to change a record in the database, from trying to change an existing address in the system (2.1) to not completing the record change (2.6). Ask students what they understand about system testing from looking at this example.
• #21: This slide describes the fifth stage of systems development, conversion. Ask students to describe each of the strategies. What would make one approach more appropriate than another? Is there any case in which a direct cutover would be the optimal strategy?
• #22: This slide describes the sixth and final stage of systems development, production and maintenance, and shows that an information system is never “finished.” Situations and business environments always change, and systems have to change along with the business. Of course, many businesses do not want to spend the resources to change their systems as required by a changing environment. And for this reason, systems can become dysfunctional, costing the firm money fixing the problems created by an outdated system. Ask students to discuss if any of the types of maintenance work listed here could be eliminated by better analysis and design?
• #23: This slide summarizes the six stages in system development. Ask students what the difference is between information requirements and design specifications.
• #24: This slide identifies the two most prominent methodologies for modeling systems and introduces the core concepts behind a structured methodology. Ask students what a process is or to give an example of a process. What does it mean to “separate data from processes”?
• #25: This slide continues the discussion of the structured methodology, looking at the tools and techniques that it uses to model an information system. An example data flow diagram is shown on the next slide, so it may be helpful to move to that slide to discuss these diagrams. A data dictionary is needed so that system builders know exactly what data is stored and manipulated. Process specifications express the logic that is used when one piece of data is transformed by a process. A structure chart looks at the main function of the system, breaks it down into subfunctions, breaks subfunctions into more detailed subfunctions, until the smallest level of detail is reached. Ask students to give an example of what the smallest level of detail might look like, for example, in a university system managing student grades and reports.
• #26: This graphic is a data flow diagram. Ask students what the rounded boxes represent (processes) and what the square box represents (an external entity). What about the open rectangle and the arrows? Where does the process begin? Ask a student to step through the process of registering a student for a course, noting what data is transferred at each step. It’s always fun to do data flow diagrams as a group because it illustrates how the same process is seen differently by different people.
• #27: This graphic shows a high-level structure chart. Note that this is high-level—and subfunctions exist for the functions “Get inputs,” “Validate inputs,” and so on. What might be a subfunction for “Calculate gross pay”?
• #28: This slide introduces the second of the two main system modeling methodologies—object-oriented development. A key concept here is that of class and inheritance. Ask students what a class is (general category of similar objects) and to describe objects that might be in the same class. For example, what objects might be in the category “Degrees” in a university’s information system?
• #29: This graphic illustrates the concept of class and inheritance in object-oriented development. The Class employee allows subclasses to be created using the “template” or superclass “Employee” and use the processes and properties defined for Employee. Subclasses can use properties of their superclass and also add their own properties. If a subclass “Intern” was added to this chart, what unique properties might it have?
• #30: This slide continues the discussion of object-oriented development, highlighting unique considerations during the systems development process. Ask students to perform some rudimentary systems analysis and design for an information system that managed inventory for a department store. What classes might be created? What properties would they have? What subclasses would there be for one of these classes and what properties would they inherit? It is important to emphasize that object-oriented development can reduce the time and cost of development through reusing objects and classes from one application for other applications.
• #31: CASE tools are software tools to automate development tasks for either of the two methodologies just discussed (structured, object-oriented). What does it mean that organizational discipline must be used to be used effectively? What kinds of gains in productivity can be expected if CASE tools are used properly?
• #32: Structured methodology and object-oriented development describe the structure of the software applications used by information systems. The next slides discuss different ways in which the work by the teams involved in creating this software can be organized. Ask students to evaluate which of these methods, if implemented effectively, they think might produce the highest ROI. Which might be the riskiest?
• #33: This slide describes the first method for building systems, the traditional systems life cycle. Ask students what the effects of unanticipated user requirements are when using this type of building method. What is the role of end users in this method? What happens when users change their minds halfway through the project? Can the systems analysis be started over?
• #34: This slide discusses the second method of systems building, prototyping. It is an explicitly iterative process. The term iterative has been used several times; ask students to describe what this means (steps to build the system can be repeated over and over). What are the benefits of an iterative process? Note that once no more iterations are needed, the prototype becomes the finished specifications for the final application, or may serve as the production version of the application.
• #35: This graphic illustrates the four steps (rectangles) of prototyping. The steps that are repeated are steps 3) use the prototype and 4) revise and enhance the prototype. Would this type of system development be appropriate for developing a large, enterprise management system?
• #36: This slide continues the discussion of prototyping, listing the advantages and disadvantages to using this method of building systems. Ask students to explain these advantages and disadvantages. For example, why is prototyping useful if there is uncertainty in requirements? What kinds of essential steps might be glossed over?
• #38: This slide continues the discussion of end-user development. What types of projects might end-user development be most suited for? How might this type of development result in a loss of control over data?
• #39: This slide discusses a fourth alternative in systems building, the use of application software packages. It is important to note that many functions are common to all business organizations—payroll, accounts receivable, or inventory control. Software packages will fulfill the need for many organizations for these types of functions. However, it is still important to perform systems analysis in order to determine your organization’s requirements for a system. Step through and explain (or have students explain) the evaluation criteria for a package. For example, you would want to outline the functions you need from the package and determine whether the software package provides that.
• #40: This slide describes a fifth alternative in systems building—outsourcing. SaaS and cloud computing were introduced in Chapter 5. Have students describe these types of outsourcing in their own words. Refer students to the Learning Tracks on outsourcing and cloud computing.
• #41: This slide continues the discussion of outsourcing. It is important to emphasize the amount of work involved in partnering and sharing work with a vendor. It may take anywhere from three months to a year to fully transfer work to a vendor. What other types of hidden costs can students identify?
• #42: This graphic looks at the best and worst case scenarios regarding hidden costs in outsourcing. The best case column shows the lowest estimates for additional costs, and the worst case reflects the highest estimates for these costs. In the Additional Cost column at the lower right, you can see that hidden costs increase the total cost of an offshore outsourcing project by an extra 15 to 57 percent. However, it is important to note that even with these extra hidden costs, many firms will benefit from offshore outsourcing if they manage the work well.
• #43: The next slides discuss application development methods that emphasize providing fast solutions needed in an increasingly digital world. What elements in RAD are similar to building methods already discussed and used in RAD–CASE tools, prototyping, and so on?
• #44: JAD is a second technique for accelerating the systems building process.
• #45: Agile development is a third technique used to accelerate the systems building process. Could all three of the techniques described be used at the same time?
• #46: Component-based development also speeds up system and software building. Web services describe Internet-standards based, reusable software components, that can be combined to build more complex applications, such as checking a customer’s credit, procurement, or placing orders.
• #47: The fastest growing business platform is the mobile tablet and smartphone platform. Rebuilding old applications for delivery on the new platform is an expensive challenge for many businesses. All the large enterprise software firms (Oracle, IBM, and SAP) have adapted their legacy software to the mobile platform (for the most part). All new application development is aimed as multiplatform delivery on the desktop, tablet, and smartphone.