Business INFORMATION SYSTEMS

B6-BIS-20
System Development- Analysis
 Learning objectives

• After this lecture, you will be able to:

– define the importance of conducting the
analysis phase to the overall success of the
system;
– choose appropriate techniques for
analysing users’ requirements for an
information system;
– construct appropriate textual descriptions
and diagrams to assist in summarising the
requirements as an input to the design
phase.
 Systems analysis
• Systems analysis is about finding out what the new
system is to do, rather than how. There are two basic
components to the analysis process:
• Fact finding – an exercise needs to take place where
all prospective users of the new system should
contribute to determining requirements.
• Documentation – detailed systems design follows the
analysis stage and it needs to be based on
unambiguous documentation and diagrams from the
analysis stage.
 Factors that will affect the
type of analysis
• The result of the ‘make-or-buy decision

• Application complexity

• User versus corporate development.

 Analysis technique –
interviewing
• Recommended practice: A range of staff are
interviewed using structured techniques to identify
features and problems of the current system and
required features of the future system.
• Closed questions: Closed questions have a restricted
choice of answers such as Yes/No or a range of opinions
on a scale from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’
(Likert scale). Approach is useful for quantitative
analysis of results.
• Open questions: Asked to elicit opinions or ideas for
the new system or to identify commonly held views
among staff. Open questions are not typically used for
quantitative analysis but can be used to identify a
 Interviewing benefits
• The ability to gather detailed information through a
two-way dialogue.
• The ability for candid, honest responses to be made.
• An open, spontaneous process which can lead to
valuable insights, especially when open questions
are used.
• Responses that can easily be quantified, especially
when closed questions are used.
• Being one of the best methods for gathering
qualitative data such as opinions, and subjective
descriptions of activities and problems.
Interviewing disadvantages
• The analyst’s findings may be colored by his or her
perceptions of how other, similar, business operations
work.
• The development of a new information system may
represent a threat through the risk of deskilling,
redundancy or perceived inability to cope with change.
Interviewees may, therefore, not cooperate with the
interview process, either by not taking part or by giving
vague and incomplete replies.
• The interviewee may tell the analyst what he or she
thinks should happen rather than what actually
happens.
• An interview at lower organisational levels may not
yield as much information as some other methods if
 Analysis technique –
questionnaires
• Questionnaires are used to obtain a range of
opinion on requirements by targeting a range
of staff. They are open to misinterpretation
unless carefully designed. They should consist
of both open and closed questions.
 Success factors –
questionnaires
• The questions will be framed by the analyst with a
clear view of the information that is to be obtained
from the completed questionnaires.
• The target audience must be carefully considered –
a questionnaire designed for clerical or operational
personnel should not contain questions that are
not relevant to their level of work.
• The questionnaire should only contain branching
(e.g. ‘if the answer to Question 3 was ‘No’, then go
to Question 8’) if it is absolutely necessary –
multiple branches create confusion and may lead
to unusable responses.
 Success factors –
questionnaires
• Questions should be simple and unambiguous so
that the respondent does not have to guess what
the analyst means.
• Multiple-choice, Likert-scale-type questions make
the questionnaire easier to fill in and allow the
results to be analysed more efficiently.
• The questionnaire should contain the required
return date and name of the person to whom the
questionnaire should be returned.
 Questionnaires – problems
• The inability of respondents to go back to the
analyst to seek clarification about what a question
means
• Difficulty in collating qualitative information,
especially if the questionnaire contains open-ended
questions
• The inability to use verbal and non-verbal signals
from the respondent as a sign to ask other or
different questions
• Low response rates – these can be lower than 20 to
25 per cent when sent to other organisations or
customers, which means that a large sample size is
needed if the results are to carry any weight.
 Analysis technique –
documentation review

• Uses information on existing systems such as

user guides or requirements specifications
together with paper or on-screen forms used
to collect information such as sales order
forms.
 Documentation benefits
• If carried out at the beginning of a
requirements analysis exercise, it will help
provide the analyst with some background
information relating to the area under
consideration.
• It may also help the analyst construct a
framework for the remainder of the exercise
and enable interviews to be conducted in a
more effective way since the analyst has some
idea of current business practices and
procedures.
• If a document review is carried out later, it can
be used to cross-check the actual business
 Documentation – problems
• There can be a large quantity of data for an
analyst to process. This is especially true in
large organisations, and it may take the
analyst a long time to identify the
documentation that is useful and that which
can be ignored.
• Documentation is often out of date. If there is
an old computerised system, it is quite
possible that the documentation has not been
changed for years, even though the system
may have changed considerably over that
period. The same can be said for the
 Documentation – benefits
• The ability to see how documents and records
are actually handled and processed
• Observation may give a greater insight into
actual business operations than simple paper
documentation
• Identification of particular operations that take
a long time
• The opportunity to see how different processes
interact with each other, thus giving the
analyst a dynamic rather than a static view of
the business situation under investigation.
 \

Analysis technique – observation

• Useful for identifying inefficiencies in an

existing way of working either with a
computer-based or manual information system.
Involves timing how long particular operations
take and observing the method used to
perform them.
 Analysis technique – brainstorming

• Brainstorming uses interaction within a group

of
staff to generate new ideas and discuss
existing problems. It is the least structured of
the fact-finding techniques.
 Requirements specification
• Requirements specification: The main
output from the systems analysis stage. Its
main focus is a description of what all the
functions of the software will be.
• Typically includes:
– Data capture
– Preferred data capture methods
– Functional requirements
– User interface layout
– Output requirements.
 Different types of
requirements
• Functional requirements: Consist of requirements
that perform the activities that run the business.
Examples include updating master files, enquiring
against data on file, producing reports and
communicating with other systems.
• Non-functional requirements: Define the
performance levels of the business functions to be
supported. Examples include online response times,
turn-round time for batch processing, security, backup
and recovery.
• Quantification of requirements: Refers to the need
for a measure of quality if the benefits are to be
properly evaluated. Examples might include reducing
customer complaints by 75 per cent, reducing the value
of unsold stock by 85 per cent or increasing online sales
by 25 per cent.
Information flow diagram (IFD)
• Information flow diagram (IFD): A simple diagram
showing how information is routed between different
parts of an organisation. It has an information focus
rather than a process focus.
• Purpose:
– to document the main flows of information around the
organisation;
– for the analyst to check that they have understood those
flows and that none has been omitted;
– for the analyst to use during the fact-finding process itself
as an accurate and efficient way to document findings as
they are identified;
– as a high-level (not detailed) tool to document information
flows within the organisation as a whole or a lower-level
tool to document an individual functional area of the
business.
Information flow diagrams – the
basic building blocks
An illustration of a simple
information flow
A simple, high-level IFD, excluding
the system boundary
The completed IFD, including the
system boundary
Thank you!