Information Systems in Organizations Systems Project Initial Questions

Instructions: Working together as a team, use these questions and a blank sheet of paper to develop your ideas for your system.

This will include a System Context-Level Data Flow Diagram, and may include some notes on analyses your system will perform or how data will be stored in it (e.g. an Entity-Relationship Diagram).

You are provided this form in order that your team may organize its thoughts.

1. What information/data handling business process are you going to automate? Briefly describe it in 1-2 sentences.

2. What people or other information systems will provide data inputs to your information system? List a few.

3. What people or information systems will receive information products (outputs) from your information system? List a few.

4. What kinds of processing might your information system perform on incoming data (Question 2) to generate the outputs needed by those who will receive them (Question 3)?

5. Draw an initial context-level Data-Flow Diagram (discussed in class). Your answers to questions 1-3 will help identify those external parties (either people or systems) who will provide your system with inputs or to whom your system will provide outputs. You should develop a short name for the system (e.g. Order Input System, or Loan Amortization System).

6. What kinds of things do you need to keep data about? How are they related? On the back of this page, you may wish to draw an initial entity relationship diagram depicting your data entities and the relationships between these. Don't worry about resolving any M:N relationships into relational tables yet. Such a model might also be useful if an input to your system is provided by a database system.

7. What kinds of data will you need as input into your analytical tool? What kinds of analyses will you perform? Describe each of these along with some initial ideas about how to achieve them.