GBIS722

This brief presentation explains the scope of this course and why I believe that this course is important. The first slide shows four major parts and one minor part of this course. The first two boxes show the part of the system development lifecycle that is the farthest from programming. In the first box we answer the important questions;
•	What development projects should we undertake?
•	What is the scope of that project?

When these questions are answered incorrectly massive project failures can occur. You may see examples of these failures on the discussion board this week. In the second box, perform analysis, we determine what the new system will do, we do not attempt to answer how the system will be built. The textbook calls the third box decision analysis; I call it cause a miracle to occur. That’s because this is where we must determine if the system is feasible to develop; estimate development cost; determine what hardware and software will be used, and determine where all of the data and processes will be placed. This is difficult in a distributed environment with many computers and many locations, the work involved here requires in depth knowledge and experience and possibly a miracle or two. The fourth box covers the more familiar tasks such as data base design, input/output design, and user interface design. The final box covers building the system including; data base implementing, programming and testing, as well as converting to the new system. This is officially beyond the scope of an analysis and design course. But we will cover this at a high level because analysis and design cannot be fully understood without an understanding of what happens in construction and conversion. The second discussion this week will be an example of this. 

The second slide shows that if a mistake is made the longer it takes to find the mistake, the more expensive the mistake is to fix. Another way of looking at this is if a mistake is made in requirements, and not found until unit testing, it’s very expensive to fix. Therefore, it is important to learn how to do a great job in systems analysis. 

Many of the skills you need to be a systems analyst are taught in this course. I found a job description for a system analyst from one of my clients. You can see on this slide some of the significant skills that they expect. The complete job description can be found on blackboard on this learning unit. This is the end of the introductory presentation, the next presentation you should visit is the presentation on chapter one.