Question 1:
Draw a work context diagram based on the system proposal provided at the end . Make sure you identify all the relevant adjacent systems and data flows. Please list all the assumptions that you make and also the information gaps that you identify at this stage
Question 2:
Identify the business events and related business use cases for the proposed information system based on the context diagram you have identified in the previous question. Make sure you include the following details in your response. You can respond to this in a tabular form.
a. Business Event Name
b. Adjacent System (s) involved
c. Related data inflows and outflows
d. Business Use Case Name
Question 3:
Assume that you are a project manager for systems development project. You need to initiate the project and are attempting to allocate Analysts to this project. Your organization has previous history of work with the client organization. But this is an area of their business which you know to be quite complex, highly regulated. You have also learnt that that the client manager sponsoring the project is somewhat autocratic and difficult to deal with. You plan allocate two analysts to your project:
Analyst A is very experienced (10 years), has been a solid but not very creative or innovative analyst in the past. He has a high level of experience working with the clients but not too much of experience with the particular domain of this project
Analyst B has about 5 years of work experience, but is new to the company. However he has already been identified as a very talented and clever analyst. He has never worked with this client organization, but has domain specific experience
Analyst C has joined the organization two years back, fresh from University. He was hired as a developer and has just moved into this role a year back. He has worked as a developer in projects related to clients but not as an analyst. He is considered very smart and analytically capable.
Discuss which two of these three you would choose, and justify clearly your reasons. Your response needs to be based on Chakraborty et al (2010). (Hint: see the enablers section for scoping). You should also keep in mind that your choice has to be optimal in terms of resource cost to your company
Question 4:
You are expected to answer the following question based on your understanding of the article Brown and Rogich (2001) attached.
Question 1
Assume that you are a senior Systems Analyst in InfoTech Ltd and that you have been entrusted by your organization to train junior system analysts so that they can elicit system requirements effectively and efficiently. The higher level management is of the opinion that it would be a good idea to develop the skills of junior analysts by enhancing their capability to ask appropriate questions to the user to collect requirements. Therefore they strongly suggest that you develop a set of questionnaire that can be used as checklist/guideline by the novice analysts. Use the theoretical concepts and the empirical results in Browne and Rogich (2001) to
A. Develop a detailed and comprehensive questionnaire that would serve as a guideline to uncover requirements for
a. Goal level requirements
b. Process level requirements
c. Task level requirements
d. Information level requirements
B. Discuss the particular prompting technique that you used to design the questions for each requirements category and why? (10 points)
EDUCOMP PROPOSED SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
EduComp Inc. plans to launch a social networking website (EduConnect) aimed at providing a collaborative forum for students currently studying at universities within the United States. The proposed website would provide students with access to educational materials for a wide variety of topics ranging across multiple academic disciplines. The users of EduConnect would be restricted to individuals who are current students in any US based university. Students would be able to register with the site as long as they have a valid email address in the .edu domain. A new student user would have to complete the registration process to be able to use the services provided by EduConnect. Registration would typically involve filling up of a short electronic form where the user would be expect to furnish personal details including name, address, university, degree program and payment detail. Once the student has completed registering, they would be provided with a selection of study groups based on universities, degree programs as well as course topic. Once the student includes the groups according to his/her preference, they would be able to download course materials posted within that group, rate such course materials and also be able to contribute materials to that group. The back end processing related to registration of student users would be entirely handled by the customer service department employess of EduComp.
The access to EduConnect is free, but the students would be charged for course materials they download. Each course material posted in any group would be associated with a brief summary about its content and topic coverage, as well as user ratings about its quality and usefulness (as rated by other users of the group). The users would also be able to preview a portion of the content of the course material but will have complete access only if they choose to download it. Each student user would be sent an electronic invoice of the charges incurred by them on at the beginning of every month effective from the day of registration. The maintenance , display and the download management of the electronic content for EduConnect would be managed by the IT operations team.
The contributors of educational materials to EduConnect would be of two kinds. EduComp will allow users to register as academic contributors. Such contributors would typically be academics who wish to contribute education materials for the site and would go through a different registration process from the student users. This registration process would be handled internally by the academic governance department of EduComp. Academic contributors would need to complete an electronic application, furnishing valid academic credentials and details about their area of expertise during the registration process. All applications from potential academic contributors would evaluated by EduComp's Academic Board (the academic board would be constituted by EduComp before EduConnect is launched and would comprise of respected senior academics and educators from universities across United States. Such academics would be invited to join the board and receive an honorarium the service they provide to the organization. Academic Board would act in advisory capacity in helping maintain academic quality and may be considered independent of EdcuComp's internal Organization). Each application for an academic contributor would be sent to the members of the Academic board, who would review their application and send in their evaluation report. The final decision about the applicant would be taken based on the majority recommendation as stated in the evaluation reports. If the application is approved, the applicant will be send the email informing of their acceptance as an academic contributor and would be given privileges to post academic material to groups related to his/her area of expertise. In case the application is rejected, the applicant would be electronically informed of the same. In addition to academic contributors, student users would also be allowed to post material to the group they belong to.
The contributions that would be considered acceptable for upload would include study notes and topical illustrative examples/problems and their solutions. Specific materials such as examination scripts or course assignments used in Universities for particular courses would be considered as unacceptable. All contributions (from academic contributors and student users) would go through a quality review process before they are posted. This review would include inspection of copyright infringement, plagiarism etc. It is expected that most contributions would go through a process of revision based on the comments provided by the employees within the Academic governance department before they are approved and posted. All contributors would receive payment based on the number of downloads of the materials posted by them. These payments would be generated on a monthly basis and paid out to the contributors along with an account statement. The student user contributors would have an option of developing credit in their account profile instead of taking actual payments. Such credits would be applied to downloads made by them during the course of the period. For student users the account statement for their contribution would be incorporated with their monthly billing invoice.