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System Analysis & Design: Lecture-4 Information Gathering

This document discusses various methods for gathering information during the system analysis process. It describes reviewing existing documentation, conducting on-site observations, performing interviews, and distributing questionnaires. Each method has advantages such as helping analysts understand current operations, producing accurate data, validating information, and assessing user opinions. Collectively, these techniques provide analysts insights into an organization's policies, goals, workflows, and information needs to analyze current systems and requirements for new systems.

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Nadim Hasan
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114 views10 pages

System Analysis & Design: Lecture-4 Information Gathering

This document discusses various methods for gathering information during the system analysis process. It describes reviewing existing documentation, conducting on-site observations, performing interviews, and distributing questionnaires. Each method has advantages such as helping analysts understand current operations, producing accurate data, validating information, and assessing user opinions. Collectively, these techniques provide analysts insights into an organization's policies, goals, workflows, and information needs to analyze current systems and requirements for new systems.

Uploaded by

Nadim Hasan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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System Analysis & Design

LECTURE-4
INFORMATION GATHERING
What kinds of information do we need??
Much of the information we need to analyze relates to the organization as below:
• Policies
• Goals
The organization
• Objectives
• Organization structure
• Authority relationships
User staff
• Job functions information requirements
• Interpersonal relationships
• Work flow Work flow itself
• Methods and procedures
• Work schedules
Where does information originate??
Primary external sources are:
•Vendors
•Government documents
•Newspapers and professional journals
The primary internal sources are:
•Financial reports
•Personnel staff
•Professional staff(legal counsel, auditor)
•System documentation or manuals
•Reports and transaction documents
Information gathering methods
Review of Records, Procedures, and
Forms
Review of existing records, procedures, and forms helps to seek insight into a system which describes
the current system capabilities, its operations, or activities.
Advantages
•It helps user to gain some knowledge about the organization or operations by themselves before they
impose upon others.
•It helps in documenting current operations within short span of time as the procedure manuals and
forms describe the format and functions of present system.
•It can provide a clear understanding about the transactions that are handled in the organization,
identifying input for processing, and evaluating performance.
•It can help an analyst to understand the system in terms of the operations that must be supported.
•It describes the problem, its affected parts, and the proposed solution.
On site Observation
This is a method of gathering information by noticing and observing the people, events, and
objects. The analyst visits the organization to observe the working of current system and
understands the requirements of the system.
Advantages
•It is useful in situation where authenticity of data collected is in question or when complexity of
certain aspects of system prevents clear explanation by end-users.
•It produces more accurate and reliable data.
•It produces all the aspect of documentation that are incomplete and outdated.
Interviewing
Systems analyst collects information from individuals or groups by interviewing. The analyst can
be formal, legalistic, play politics, or be informal; as the success of an interview depends on the
skill of analyst as interviewer.
It can be done in two ways −
Unstructured Interview − The system analyst conducts question-answer session to acquire basic
information of the system.
Structured Interview − It has standard questions which user need to respond in either close
(objective) or open (descriptive) format.
Advantages of Interviewing
•This method is frequently the best source of gathering qualitative information.
•It is useful for them, who do not communicate effectively in writing or who may not have the
time to complete questionnaire.
•Information can easily be validated and cross checked immediately.
•It can handle the complex subjects.
•It is easy to discover key problem by seeking opinions.
•It bridges the gaps in the areas of misunderstandings and minimizes future problems.
Questionnaires
This method is used by analyst to gather information about various issues of system from large
number of persons.
There are two types of questionnaires −
Open-ended Questionnaires − It consists of questions that can be easily and correctly
interpreted. They can explore a problem and lead to a specific direction of answer.
Closed-ended Questionnaires − It consists of questions that are used when the systems analyst
effectively lists all possible responses, which are mutually exclusive
Advantages of questionnaires
•It is very effective in surveying interests, attitudes, feelings, and beliefs of users which are not
co-located.
•It is useful in situation to know what proportion of a given group approves or disapproves of a
particular feature of the proposed system.
•It is useful to determine the overall opinion before giving any specific direction to the system
project.
•It is more reliable and provides high confidentiality of honest responses.
•It is appropriate for electing factual information and for statistical data collection which can be
emailed and sent by post.

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