My book doesn’t have a chapter 10, so these answers may be skewed from the expected responses.
An organization has a lot of options when new opportunities arise or competitors threaten to take market share. An organization in such situations can build a new information system designed to operate towards a goal in a more efficient and less costly method. This can give them an advantage over competitors or enable them to take advantage of a new opportunity that they previously couldn’t. Their mission statement should ensure they implement such strategies in a way that falls in line with the goals laid out for their organization at its inception.
When an information system is designed to automate a process, it probably removes jobs from the organization. On the other hand, this decreases residual cost to the organization and is generally more reliable and efficient. A problem with an automated system is that when something “breaks”, if nobody is monitoring the system, it could take awhile before it gets noticed. Once it is noticed, someone highly specialized has to fix the problem and get the system running again. A user-oriented system will have user error and presumably higher maintenance costs (payroll), however, each error is probably going to be less dire than an entire system going down. Users can also perform much more detailed tasks and think for themselves.
Well I am tier 2 application maintenance at my job, so I am frustrated with how a program works on a nearly daily basis. In my personal life, I have had some difficulties with some obscure applications that don’t have any user support on a few occasions. I’ve always fixed the problem myself, typically with the help of google. At work I have recurring problems on a daily basis that are definitely caused by the way the application is designed. There are specific instructions for users to follow doing certain things, and when those steps aren’t followed, problems come. The best way to stop this would be to prevent users from doing this in the first place, but that isn’t worth the time it would take to fix according to management.
I would partially agree with this. In UML you lay out the design of the program very thoroughly. This typically involves defining all user interactions with the system. I would argue this is a better method of design than just laying out the user documentation ahead of time. Designing a system entirely on paper first, in my opinion, streamlines the creation process and prevents what might otherwise be unforeseen errors.
