Page 501 - Using MIS

Q4 What Are the Phases in the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)? 469

Business- System
Planning Denition
Process System Need Project
• Dene system Plan
goals and scope. Requirements
• Assess feasibility Analysis
(cost, schedule,
technical,
organizational).
• Form project team.
Figure 12-10 • Plan project.
SDLC: System Definition Phase

Define System Goals and Scope
As Figure 12-10 shows, the first step is to define the goals and scope of the new information sys-
tem. Information systems exist to facilitate an organization’s competitive strategy by supporting
business processes or by improving decision making. At this step, the development team de-
fines the goal and purpose of the new system in terms of these reasons.
Consider PRIDE. The current systems are working for competitions, but the team wants an
Xbox application. What, exactly, does that mean? What kind of an application? How fancy of a
user interface is needed? In broad strokes, what is the Xbox application to do?
In other systems, the scope might be defined by specifying the users, or the business pro-
cesses, or the plants, offices, and factories that will be involved.

Assess Feasibility

Once we have defined the project’s goals and scope, the next step is to assess feasibility. This step
answers the question, “Does this project make sense?” The aim here is to eliminate obviously
nonsensible projects before forming a project development team and investing significant labor.
Feasibility has four dimensions: cost, schedule, technical, and organizational. Because IS
development projects are difficult to budget and schedule, cost and schedule feasibility can be
only an approximate, back-of-the-envelope analysis. The purpose is to eliminate any obviously
infeasible ideas as soon as possible.
Cost feasibility is an assessment of whether the anticipated benefits of the system are
likely to justify the estimated development and operational costs. In some cases, it also means
whether the project can realistically be done within the budget provided. Clearly, costs depend
on the scope of the project. Saying we’re going to build an Xbox prototype with a game-like
interface doesn’t provide much for the team to go on. So, at this point, all the team can do is to
make rough estimates. Given those estimates, the team can then ask, “Does this project make
For a discussion of the ethical
issues relating to cost estimates, sense? Will we obtain sufficient return to justify these estimated costs?” At PRIDE, Zev most
see the Ethics Guide on pages likely asked for a prototype because he didn’t like the $100K to $300K range for developing the
470–471. full system.
Like cost feasibility, schedule feasibility is difficult to determine because it is hard to esti-
mate the time it will take to build the system. However, if James and his team determine that it
will take, say, no less than 6 months to develop the system and put it into operation, Jared and
Zev can then decide if they can accept that minimum schedule. At this stage of the project, the
organization should not rely on either cost or schedule estimates; the purpose of these esti-
mates is simply to rule out any obviously unacceptable projects.
Technical feasibility refers to whether existing information technology is likely to be able
to meet the needs of the new system. With regard to the Xbox prototype, the team would assess
technical differences between the mobile devices it currently supports and the xBox. For ex-
ample, can an Xbox effectively connect to exercise equipment using the Ant protocol?