Acquiring Information System

Information system can be acquired one of the 3 ways:

1) Off-the-shelf (packaged) development

 It involves direct purchase of a pre-written application used by more than one
organisation.
 It is available for a whole variety of hardware platform from PC to mainframes.
 Pros:
 developed in low cost
 Bugs/errors are lesser than any other methodologies.
 S/w developed with this manner has benefits of fitting the requirements of a
large no. Of businesses.
 Cons:
Contains many features which is not that much useful for some small organisation.

2) Bespoke development
 Refresh to information system which is developed by an information system
professional of the company itself, called as in-house bespoke development, match
the business requirements of the application.
 Pros:
 Produce software tailored to the precise requirements of the business.
 Cons:
 Expensive to develop.
 Time delays exist.
 It may contain more bugs than off-the-shelf.

3) End-user development:
 End-user software is software written by non-IS professionals,I.e. the business users.
 Such systems may be simple such as spreadsheet or a small PC database.
 Such applications are typically for individual or departmental use.
 Pros:
 The main benefit of this kind of development is that its is normally used by
those who develop it and so the requirements are not subject to
mistranslation or the provision of over- sophisticated solutions.
 Cons:
 The negative side to this is that in some cases inappropriate software
development tools might be used such as complicated spreadsheet instead
of the construction of a database.
 This kind is software may be riddled with bugs.

Factors affecting software acquisition

There are a no. Of factors that will influence the choices of acquisition
method. Three critical ones are:
 Time
 Cost
  Quality
Other than that:
 Organisation size
 In-house IS/IT expertise
 Complexity of the required information system
 Uniqueness of the business
 IS/IT expertise among end-users
 Linkages with existing application software

Developing Information System

This topic is covered in the following pdf.

SDLC models_in_detail.pdf