CIS 255

 Impertinence—question everything  Impartiality  Relaxing of Constraints—Assume everything is possible.  Attention to Detail—Every fact must fit every other fact  Reframing—look at the problem in new ways

 Interviews  Questionnaires  Observations of Workers  Business Documents

 Plan interview—prepare a checklist, agenda, questions  Be neutral  Listen and take notes  Review notes—transcribe them within 48 hours  Seek diverse points of view

 Open ended questions –what is the worst thing about your current system?  Close ended questions—multiple choice, true/false, ranking

 Must be careful who you sample and if there is a bias in the answers  Questions must be unambigous  Better for gathering specific information, than for determining general requirments

 Interviews are more open ended and allow immediate follow up on answers  Questionnaires allow access to larger groups and have a quicker response time.  It is harder to judge the accuracy or truthfulness of a questionnaire.  Questionnaires tend to be less expensive than interviews

 Observation is essential  Workers often do not have a full, accurate appreciation for what they do  They may take parts of it for granted as being too trivial to mention  They may not mention the interruptions and other events that contribute to what they do

 Documents can tell you ◦ Problems with current system ◦ Opportunities to meet new needs if only information were available ◦ Organizational directions ◦ Titles and names of key individuals ◦ Values of the organization ◦ Special information processing circumstances ◦ Reasons why the current system has its present design ◦ Data, rules for processing data

 Joint Application Design  Business Process Reengineering

 Joint Application Design brings all the stakeholders together in the design process— literally bringing them all to one room

 Session Leader  Users  Managers  Sponsor (Vice President, President of company)  Systems analysts  Scribe  IS staff

 This is basically to ask the question, if we could start over from scratch, how would we redesign the system differently.  It advocated radical redesign of individual business systems