1. Why can a new information system be considered planned organizational change?
An information system is a sociotechnical entity, an arrangement of both technical and social elements.
Info. Systems change involved hardware and software.
In addition it involves changes in jobs, skills, management and organization.
When we design a new info. System, we are redesigning the organization, reordering its technical and social elements.

2. How can enterprise analysis and critical success factors be used to establish organization-wide info. sys. Requirements?
Both approaches attempt to gain a clear understanding of organization’s long and short-term information requirements.
Both use interviews of manager to gain the information needed.
Enterprise analysis approaches the problem by looking at the entire organization in terms of organizational units, functions, processes, and data elements.
This approaches takes a large sample of managers and asks them how they use info, where they get the info., what their environment is like, what their objectives are, how they make decisions, and what their data needs are.
This data is aggregated into subunits, functions, processes, and data matrices.
From this info, conclusions are drawn about the organization-wide info sys. requirements

3. How can enterprise analysis and critical success factors be used to establish organization-wide info. sys. Requirements?
The CSF approaches interviews a smaller number of top managers who are asked to identify their goals and objectives essential to those goals.
These critical success factors (CSFs) are aggregated to develop a picture of the overall organization’s CSFs.
The last step is to designate systems that are needed to deliver these critical success factors.

4. What is business reengineering?
A business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome.
Business reengineering changes a business process to improve speed, service, and quality.
It serves to reorganize work flows, combining steps to cut waste and eliminating repetitive, paper-intensive tasks, sometimes eliminating jobs as well.
Business reengineering can be used to reshape how the organization carries out its business, even the nature of the business itself.

5. What is business reengineering?
Traditional automation automates the business process as it is in order to speed up existing tasks, while rationalization of procedures changes some procedures largely within the framework of traditional business functions, eliminating obvious bottlenecks and making operating procedures more efficient.
Business reengineering tries to streamline processes that transcend traditional functions.

6. What steps are required to make business reengineering effective?
Develop the business vision and process objectives.
Identify the processes to be redesigned.
Understand and measure the performance of existing processes.
Understanding the opportunities for applying information technology.
Build a prototype of the new process.

7. Difference between systems analysis & systems design
System analysis is the analysis of the problem that the organization will try to solve with an information system
It consists of
defining the problem,
identifying its causes,
specifying solutions, and
identifying the information requirements that must be met by a system solution

8. Difference between systems analysis & systems design
System design shows how the system will fulfill the information requirements specified in system analysis.
It has three objectives:
Considering alternative technology configurations
The management and control of the technical realization of the system
Detailing the system specifications

9. What is feasibility
Feasibility determines whether a solution is achievable given organizational resources and constraints.
The three major areas of feasibility are:
Technical feasibility => Which determines whether a proposed system can be implemented with available hardware, software, and technical expertise
Economic feasibility => Which determines whether the proposed system will be cost-effective.
Operational feasibility => Which determines whether the proposed system can function within the existing managerial and organizational framework.

10. What are information requirements?
Information requirements involve identifying who needs what information, where, when, and how.
They define the objectives of the new or modified system and contain a detailed description of the functions the new system must perform.
Gathering information requirements is perhaps the most difficult task of the systems analyst, and the faulty requirements analysis is a leading cause of systems failure and high systems development costs.

11. Why information requirements are difficult to determine correctly?
Information requirements are difficult to determine because business functions can be very complex and/or poorly defined.
A manual system or a routine set of inputs and outputs may not exist.
Procedures may vary from individual to individual, and users may disagree on how things are or should be done.
Defining requirements is a laborious process, requiring a great deal of research and often many reworkings by the analyst

12. Difference between the logical & the physical design of an Info. Sys.
Logical design describes the components of an information system and their relationship to each other as they would appear to users.
It shows what the system solution will be but not how it will actually be implemented.
Physical design translates the abstract logical model into specific technical design for the system.
It produces the actual specifications for hardware, software, physical databases, input/output media, manual procedures, and specific controls

13. Testing stages of sys. development
Testing is critical to the success of a system because it is the only way to ascertain whether the system will produce the right results.
Three stages of information system testing are:
Unit testing => Individual programs are separately tested.
System testing => The entire system as a whole is tested to determine whether program modules are interacting as planned.
Acceptance testing => The system undergoes final certification by end-users to ensure that it is ready for installation.

14. What is conversion?
Conversion is the process of changing from the old system to the new one.
A detailed conversion plan is essential to insure that all aspects of conversion are treated properly and validated.
They include data conversion, procedural conversion and training

15. What role do programming, production, and maintenance play in Sys
What role do programming, production, and maintenance play in Sys. development?
Programming translates the design specification into software, thus providing the actual instructions for the computer.
Programming constitutes a smaller portion of the systems development cycle than design and perhaps testing activities.
Production is the operation of the system once it has been installed and conversion is complete.
The system will be reviewed during production by both users and technical specialists to determine how well it has met its original objectives and to decide whether any revisions or modifications arte needed

16. What role do programming, production, and maintenance play in Sys
What role do programming, production, and maintenance play in Sys. development?
Maintenance is modifications to hardware, software, documentation or procedures to a production system to correct errors, meet new requirements or improve processing efficiency

17. How implementation is related to information success or failure?
Implementation is all the organizational activities working toward the adoption, management, and routinization of an innovation such as an information system.
Role of users, management support, the handling of complexity of the project, and management of implementation determine the success or failure of the implementation of the information system.

18. Describe the ways that implementation can be managed to make the organizational change process more successful
Techniques are:
Increasing user involvement
Overcoming user resistance
Managing the technical complexity with internal integration tools and experienced project managers with administrative and technical experience.
Formal planning and control tools.
Controlling risk factors such as possible political risk or technological risk.

19. The capital budgeting methods
The payback method
Measures time required to pay back the initial investment in the project.
This method is good for high-risk projects where useful life is difficult to know.
However it ignores the time value of money, the cash flow after the payback period, and the disposal value and the profitability of the investment.
Accounting rate of the return on investment (ROI)
Calculates the return from an investment by adjusting the project inflows produced by the investment for depreciation.
The rate of return must equal or exceed the cost of capital in the marketplace, or no one will lend the firm money.
This model approximates the accounting income that would be earned by the project.

20. The capital budgeting methods
Cost-benefit ratio
This simple method divides total benefits by total costs giving a ratio of benefits to costs.
Any value above 1.0 is a positive ratio.
The method can be used to rank several projects for comparison.
The ratio can be calculated using present values to account for the time value of money.
Net present value
Money received in the future must be discounted to be able to compare it with current money.
The net present value is the amount of money an investment is worth, taking into account its cost, earnings and the time value of benefits, one can determine one measure of profitability.

21. The capital budgeting methods
Profitability index
This index is calculated by dividing the present value of the total cash inflow by the initial cost of the investment.
The result is a profitability measure that, unlike the net present value, can be used to compare to alternative investments.
Internal rate of return (IRR)
This variation of net present value is defined as the rate of return or profit an investment is expected to earn

22. The limitations of the capital budgeting methods
Financial models assume all relevant alternatives have been examined, that all costs and benefits are known, and that those costs and benefits can be expressed in terms of money.
These assumptions are rarely met in the real world.
Only tangible benefits can be quantified and assigned a monetary value.
Intangible benefits cannot be immediately quantified but may lead to quantifiable gains in the ling run.
Those models can be selectively used to support political decisions made for organizational reasons having nothing to do with the cost and benefits of a system.

23. The limitations of the capital budgeting methods
Financial models do not always express the risks and uncertainty of their own cost and benefits estimates.
They also fail to consider the fact that costs are usually up front while benefits tend to be back-loaded.
No financial model can adjust for the fact that IT can easily change during the course of the project.
In addition, firms can invest in capital projects for many noneconomic reasons that are not captured by financial models.
They may be undertaken to support strategic considerations or to meet government requirements or to satisfy some non-market public demand

24. Portfolio analysis
It can be used to select and evaluate info. Sys. Investments using nonfinancial and strategic considerations.
It compares a portfolio of potential projects based upon the projects’ expected risks and benefits.
Projects are categorized as high or low risk and high or low benefits (benefits are not necessarily financial).
Thus four ratings are achieved: high risk-high benefits, high risk-low benefits, low risk-high benefits, and low risk-low benefits.
High benefits-low risk projects are generally preferred, while low benefit-high risk projects are to be avoided.

25. Scoring model
It can be used to select and evaluate info. Sys. Investments using nonfinancial and strategic considerations.
The scoring model result, in a single score for a project that can then be used to compare against other projects scored the same way.
Criteria are listed and weighted, and then alternative projects are rated by criteria by those involved in judging the projects.
Scoring models are meant to be relatively “objective” techniques but involve many quantitative judgments.
They are used most commonly to confirm, rationalize, and support decisions rather than to make decisions.
Their greatest value often is the agreement on criteria to be used to judge the system.