Systems Requirements and Prototyping

Abstract

This case study is based on a multi-year information systems plan for a marketing firm. Initially, the investigation was enterprise-wide. We describe the critical components of the enterprise system, including the software and hardware architectures. For the application systems, the accounting system and the job scheduling system receive top priority. Since the accounting system was a commercial off-the-shelf product, our focus was on the development of the job scheduling system. We explain the manual job scheduling process and how the automated system might be developed. The justification for adopting Microsoft’s Access, SQL server, Exchange, and Project as the development tools is presented. Microsoft Access was used just for the prototyping. Eventually, the job scheduling system will be implemented on the Project software with some rewriting of Visual Basic codes. To date, a prototype using Access had been developed and demonstrated. It received favorable comments and has been approved for the next development phase. The case study concludes with remarks on the advantages, issues and lessons learned from the project.