SHES2302-SIstem Maklumat

Tutorial 4

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Matric No:

1. List and briefly identify the three primary activities of the project identification and
selection phase

The three primary activities of the project identification and selection phase:

(a) identifying potential development projects

Organizations vary as to how they identify projects. This process can be performed by:

 A key member of top management

 A sterring committee
 User departments
 The development group or a senior IS manager.

(b) Classifying and ranking IS development projects

 Can be performed by top manager, a starring committee, business units, or the IS

development group.
 The criteria used to assign the merit of a given project can vary based on the size of the
organization.
 Several criteria might be used during the classifying process.

(c) Selecting IS development projects

 Final activity is to select the projects

 The short-and long-term projects must likely to achieve business objectives are
considered
 The identification and selection projects is a very important and ongoing activity

2. Identify six reasons why improved information systems project identification and selection is
needed.

 Systems maintenance costs are out of control as old, poorly planned systems must
constantly be revised.

 Many systems often do not identify the critical problems of the business as a whole or
support strategic applications.
  Many systems cannot manage applications that cross organizational boundaries.

 Data redundancy is often out of control, and users may have little confidence in the
quality of data.

 The cost of information systems has increase steadily and approaches 40% of total
expenses in some organizations.

 Application backlogs often extend 3 years or more, and frustrated end users are forced
to create (or purchase) their own systems, often creating redundant databases and
incompatible systems in the process.

3. What is a top-down planning approach ? Identify four advantages to the top-down planning
approach over other planning approaches.

Top-down planning approach is a planning where we divide all the things required into a few
high-level items then, explode them into greater levels of detail as the planning process
proceeds. Very often this explosion stops at a relatively high/summary level of detail for the
initial planning and is only expanded into full detail shortly before each new phase of work.

Advantages of top-down approach:

a) Fewer operations errors.

 Each module has to be processed separately, so programmers get large amount of
time for processing.

b) Much less time consuming.

 Each programmer is only involved in a part of the big project.

c) Very optimized way of processing.

 Each programmer has to apply their own knowledge and experience to their parts
(modules), so the project will become an optimized one.

d) Easy to maintain.

 If an error occurs in the output, it is easy to identify the errors generated from which
module of the entire program.