Stages of the system life cycle
Investigative approaches
Software development methodologies
Testing Systems
Requirements, design and system specifications
Roles and responsibilities of the project team
Planning tools: CPA and Gantt Charts
Entity relationship diagrams, DFD, flowcharts
A new IT system may be commissioned for a number of reason
The company might want to improve the quality of a repetitive task.
Doing the sam ething over and over is very tiring and tedious for a
person. A robotic system may be able to help with this. For instance
the car industry makes heavy use of robots in their factories
A new part of the company needs IT support e.g. a new customer service help desk
The organisation has grown and the current system can't cope with the increased
demands placed on it.Perhaps the company had only a few customers to start with
but now it needs to be able to deal with hundreds of accounts
A competitor has developed a new system or process and the organisation
needs something similar in order to offer the same service to customers
Technology might have moved on and new things are
possible that couldn't be done with the previous system
The current one is out of date and no longer doing its job effectively
IT Systems are used to make the lives of businesses easier
Supermarkets
Payroll systems
Stock control systems
Government
Online census information
Online tax payment system
Hospitals
Appointment systems for outpatients
Pharmacy systems for keeping track of drugs and creating printed prescritions
Banks
Systems for approving or rejecting mortgage applications
Systems for ATM
machines
Customer record systems
Problems with new IT systems
A survey of over 14,000 organisations showed that where new IT systems were being developed:
80-90% of systems fail to meet performance goals
80% of systems are late and over budget
40% of systems fail or are abandoned
Just 10-20% of business meet all their success criteria
As people have learnt from mistakes, a model has
been developed and refined over the years to try
and maximise the chances of a successful project.
The Systems Life Cycle
The System Life Cycle is a process of stages which occur during the development of a new ICT system
If organisations follow the stages of the System Life
Cycle, they should be able to avoid many problems.