Information System Interview and Analysis   Term Paper ID:36486 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: This paper covers an interview with the analyst designer of a large insurance tracking ...... More...

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Paper Abstract: This paper covers an interview with the analyst/designer of a large insurance tracking system, tracing the history of the project, the expectations of the customer, and the outcome of the project. Paper Introduction: Information System Interview and AnalysisCompany Background The company for which the system was developed was a mid-sized privateinsurance company with nationwide presence and a few small subsidiaries The average age of employees was and average tenure of employment wasapproximately years The company had a liberal continuing educationpolicy and paid for education and training as well as providing video-basedtraining on site System Background Information The original system was primarily a transaction system designed tosupport functional users that serviced credit life insurance policies onpersonally Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Shewas the sole analyst and designer on the project and had a B.A. However,she revised these ideas on a daily basis. It was clear that in this project, the analyst's care to include thecustomer in every stage of the development was what made the implementationsuccessful. In the initial meeting where the systems analyst met with the customer-afunctional manager-to discuss the system requirements, the customer statedopenly that she did not want to work with IT and did not want the systemdeveloped. Due to the missing snapshot function, the customer and herstaff felt the system was harder to use than the prior system when tryingto determine the status of variables at a particular point in time.However, aside from that drawback, the new system provided more relevantand intuitive functionality and improved productivity. Information System Interview and AnalysisCompany Background. The user reluctantly agreed to this afterfailing to convince the analyst that the full snapshots were necessaryfunctionality. The development of the system was prompted by an unsatisfactory priorsystem that had been developed by the Information Technology (IT)department with little customer input. She had two years of tenure with theorganization at the time of the project. The customer was interviewed regarding the length of time the projecttook to complete (1.5 years from first meeting to final implementation andtraining), and although management felt this seemed lengthy, she was happyto report that a system of similar size and function in a neighboringdepartment was still being developed after seven years of effort by adifferent IT group. During the analysis process, the customer had clear ideas from thebeginning concerning what the system's functionality should be. It became evident that the moreshe reflected on the new system's potential, the more details sheremembered concerning functions the system should have, and the more newideas she had for additional capabilities that she would like it to have.As the analyst met with the customer on a daily basis, she fleshed out thenew system design and the customer's concept began to firm up somewhat. From time to time, the analyst would review progress to datewith them to keep them in the loop and verify that they were in agreementwith the work that had been done so far.Post-Implementation Stage. in a non-technical field plus much additional training in systems subjects. Her primary concern was that she would again be given a systemthat was unsatisfactory and developed without her input. For example, the system was developed considerably before theY2K rollover, but the analyst had anticipated the Y2K problem anyway andmade the year fields four positions. After spending the initial days of the project with the customer, theanalyst began interviewing her staff. The project to design areplacement system was actually initiated by a lead systems developmentmanager rather than by the customer, who had become thoroughly disenchantedwith IT as a result of the prior unsatisfactory system development project. However, there was one function that she had been unable toconvince the analyst to incorporate, and this was found to be moreimportant than anticipated. In its upgrade, the new system was slated to meet strategicplanning goals. Management wassatisfied with the ROI and felt that the trade-off of having the analystcommitted throughout the entire project was worth having the customersatisfied, as she had been vocal in the past about her dissatisfaction withthe prior system. Even though the system itself lacked some of the functionalityit should have had, the user was still satisfied. This made Y2K transparent to thatsystem and would eliminate all Y2K-associated problems with nointervention. The company had a liberal continuing educationpolicy and paid for education and training as well as providing video-basedtraining on site.System Background Information. The original system was primarily a transaction system designed tosupport functional users that serviced credit life insurance policies onpersonally owned vehicles in response to telephone claim requests.However, the customer requested that strategic information be included inthe new system to enable her to do what-if projections and strategicplanning, tasks she had been performing manually.Initiation Stage. The customer could make an inquiry via the system to see exactlywhat all the variable values were on a specific date, and the screen wouldpopulate with all the values. After sitting with thecustomer's staff and watching them use the new system, the analyst began tounderstand what the customer had been trying to convey about the importanceof the snapshot and agreed that the historical function did not provide thesame information or efficiency from the customer's point of reference. She also felt that the portion of that system that wasalready functional was clunky and difficult to use. Aside from the snapshot function, the customer and her staff weresatisfied with the system and felt that it met expectations. The customergradually became cooperative, and finally supportive of the project. The reason for this wasthat policies were being "bent" to accommodate what the customer wanted.Since she was a disgruntled customer, the new project was intended tosmooth over past differences and provide her the functionality she hadexpected from the prior system. The interviewee for this paper was the systems analyst, aged 34, whohad designed the replacement system. Her additional ideas and suggestions wereretained, however, for a follow-up project that was being planned toupgrade the system following implementation. The new system was also designed modularly, which meantthat modifications were faster and easier and less likely to initiate newsystem defects, which had been a serious problem with the old system. After specifications were written and signed off on by the customer,the programmers began writing the programs while the analyst continuedworking with the customer to refine and augment the system's functionality. The customer became notorious for changing her mind, and several timescode that had already been written had to be modified after the customerwas given a demo and found that it did not function as she had expected.Midway through the project, the system development was "frozen"; i.e., thecustomer was not allowed to make any further changes except in cases oferror or wrong functionality. IT policies were not communicated to the functional users in theinitiation stage other than the primary customer. Functional users played a role in the planning process, but for themost part they were represented by the primary customer, who was theirsupervisor. Since the system was the only means of checkingand maintaining policies and fulfilling claims, it was vital to thedepartment's work. This was in sharpcontrast to the user's prior IT experience where an analyst only spent acouple of days interviewing her and then designed a system "in an ivorytower." Contact with the user was the critical success factor and revealedthat making the user feel comfortable and part of the process was asimportant to her as providing the right functionality. The formal channel forconcerns to be heard preexisted the project and consisted of weeklyfunctional meetings attended by the IT manager supervising the project.This was a formal type of meeting, and the analyst found that she and thecustomer could work out concerns between them more easily than goingthrough that channel. The company for which the system was developed was a mid-sized privateinsurance company with nationwide presence and a few small subsidiaries.The average age of employees was 37, and average tenure of employment wasapproximately 1 years. The technicalskills they already had were sufficient for using the new system, and itwas more intuitive than the old one it was replacing. Since she was planning to rectify the problem during theupgrade, she was somewhat appeased about her failure to identify theimportance of the function in her analysis. By comparison,therefore, she was extremely satisfied that her system took considerablyless development time and had been tailored to her expectations.The Interviewee. Also, she was proud of the fact that except for two smallnon-error changes that the user had requested, the system was implementedbug-free on day one.Conclusion. An entire screenful of data was captured to showwhat the status of multiple variables was at the time any policy eventoccurred. Fromthat point on, the objectives of the customer, the IT department, ITmanagers, and the systems analyst were in sync. She felt that the customer's efforts toconvince her to include it had failed because the customer had been unableto demonstrate why it was truly needed. It also possessedfar more relevant functionality than the old system. The functionalusers found that the new system was much faster than the old and that theycould complete more work in the same amount of time. The system was very important to the work of the functionaldepartment. Upon implementation of the system, the absence of snapshotsbecame an issue, and the customer expressed her dissatisfaction with thehistorical function that had replaced it. All of the information used by the department resided on thesystem, and virtually all of the functions performed by the group wereperformed via the system. The analystallowed her to express her concerns and then assured her that her inputwould be solicited through every stage of the project. The rest of the system had been carefullythought through, and the system's future needs were anticipated fairlyaccurately. The analyst brought the customer and her stafftogether and assisted them in sorting out the details until they were inaccord regarding the system's functionality requirements and the workflowprocess to be followed. Since there were many policy events duringthe life of a policy and the system handled a large number of policies, theanalyst explained that for system efficiency, the full-screen saves wouldbe replaced with a historical function that recorded the exact date andtime each policy event occurred. Although she had designed oneother full system prior to this project, she had been reassigned to thisproject before that system was developed. The customer's prior system, althoughextremely inadequate, had allowed her to view a "snapshot" of a policy at aparticular point in time. Thesnapshot function was one of the things planned for the post-implementationupgrade. As partof her job description, she supervised a team of four programmers whoperformed the coding and testing and conducted periodic demos to show thecustomer how each new module worked. This resulted in a number ofdiscrepancies in which the staff performed tasks differently than thecustomer thought they did. The system lacked the functionalitythat the customer needed and had to be replaced. Asthe system began to take shape, the analyst modeled the system on paper andwalked the customer through the model for verification that the systemwould have the functionality needed. This insurance tracking systemwas the first project that she had been involved in from initiation throughimplementation and only the second system she had designed in full. However, before the upgradeproject began, the insurance tracking arm of the company was sold, and thesystem was never upgraded. Only after implementation did thisbecome obvious. Since the analyst worked very closely with the customer during theentire project from initiation through post-implementation, the customerfound that most of her concerns had been addressed adequately right fromthe beginning. The system in itsdelivered format did not meet any further strategic goals, although it didmeet all the strategic goals the original system was supposed to have metand didn't. She expressed satisfaction about theanalysis/design process and was happy with the final deliverable except forthe unfortunate snapshot function. 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