Developing An Information System For UNICEF Child Care

Approach for Developing Information System

Discuss About The Jordanian Information Technology Companies.

As the “UNICEF Child Care” (UCC) has opened multiple branches in Brisbane, Melbourne, Rockhampton and Gold Coast and facing difficulties in operating them with current manual process thus it is important for them to develop and deploy a central information management system (Coeurderoy, Guilmot and Vas 2014).  The main objective of this information system development project is to automate the manual processes as well as reduce the wastage of the resources at the different branches and provide improved services to its clients.

 The following report contributes to the discussion about the approach for the development of the information system, functional and non-functional requirements for the proposed information system.  In addition to that, different sections of this consist of discussion on cost benefit analysis of the development project, schedule of the project and techniques to be used   for system information requirements.

 For UCC, having multiple branches at different locations it becomes difficult to manage and integrate the available information coming from different branches. With more than 40 employees working at different branches it becomes complex to manage the payment related data, generating receipts, invoices for the suppliers with the manual system (Liu et al. 2016).  The current manual system is mainly inefficient for the below mentioned reasons,

1. Duplication of the data related to the payments and other processes at different branches.
2. Inefficient management of the payment related data from the different branches.

• Complexity in managing the financial data related to the suppliers and stock at different branches.

1. Employees are unable to find required information whenever they require due to the complex and manual data management process.

As there may be different changes related to the information system that needs to be accommodated in between the different phases of the project. Therefore, we are select the agile system development approach for this project.

Compared to the other development methodologies, the agile methodology requires very less documentations thus optimize use of the resources as well as time for the software system development projects.

 In this methodology, any new requirements related to the project can be accommodated without thinking about the budget constraint.

 Prototypes of the desired application and testing of those prototypes helps the project team to determine the gap between the requirements and developed project.

As the system will be used by both the administrators and the users (i.e. the parents) thus the system should be developed in multiple modules such as customer module, admin module, accounts module as well as inventory management module. In the following section the modules and desired functionalities are described in brief.

In order to use the developed information system every user must have a unique password and password.  Again as the different departments of the organization does not need access to the all types of data available in the system (Schwalbe 2015). Therefore, the users will have authorization levels so that the employees will have access only to that information which are required for completing their responsibilities. In this way exploitation of the data can be eliminated.    

Functional and Non-Functional Requirements

 For this module, Before the customers pay for the services they have to provide their details such as their email and other credentials so that the UCC can send back the receipts to the customers. In this way the customer does not have come to the branch in order to get the invoice of the payment.

 This module of the information system will be used by the accounts department of the Organization.  Such as the details of deposited payment from the parents of the children, expenses incurred by the different branches of the Organization.

  It will be used to easily manage and track the inventories at different branches so that the wastage can be reduced that happens in the manual process.

  This module of the application will be used by the top level management of the organization in order to manage the users and overall performance of the users.

 Following are the non-functional requirements for the proposed information system

Reliability:  The system should be able to protect the data through unauthorised access from unauthorized users.

Availability: This is about making the system with lesser downtime so that the services are available to the users as soon as necessary maintenance of the system is completed.  

Usability:   Proposed information system should be easy to use even for a non-technical user so that they can complete their tasks with ease.  

 The cost benefit analysis of the proposed information system will help the organization to determine the economic feasibility of the project.  It will compare the total cost to develop and maintain the solution for the organization with the tangible value of the benefits from the implemented system (Coeurderoy, Guilmot and Vas 2014). Following is the table that shows the calculation of the cost and benefit from this project.

Cost required for Hardware	$         45,000.00
Cost required for Software	$         30,000.00
Development team Cost	$         65,000.00
Training Cost	$         20,000.00
Total Cost for Development	$       1,60,000.00
Hardware maintenance cost	$         10,000.00
Software maintenance cost	$         15,000.00
Operational cost	$         40,000.00
Total Operational Cost	$         65,000.00
Overall savings	$       1,14,000.00
Maintenance cost of  the system	$         60,000.00
Total Benefit	$       1,74,000.00
Discount Rate	6.00%

Table 1: Cost Benefit analysis of the Information system development project

Following is the schedule and Gnatt chart for the project of developing an information system for UCCC.

Task Name	Duration
Information system development for UNICEF Child Care	165 days
Planning	29 days
Gather Requirements	10 days
Analyze Requirements	5 days
Feasibility Study	8 days
project plan and Proposal Submission	4 days
Completion of Project Plan	2 days
Analysis	24 days
Determine functional and non-functional Requirement	15 days
Review of the Functional specification	5 days
Review of the Non-functional requirements	2 days
Finalizing the functional and non-functional requirements	2 days
Design	50 days
Development of the first prototype	25 days
Get feedback from the Client	5 days
Accommodate new functionalities	20 days
Alpha release of the Information system	5 days
refine and Amend new functionalities	15 days
Beta release of the system	5 days
Testing	25 days
Functional Testing	10 days
Security testing	5 days
User Acceptance report	10 days
Deployment and go live	12 days
Deploy the System with the required Framework	5 days
Provide Training to the users of the system	7 days

The project schedule for this information system development project is give above. As we can observe in the above schedule that most of the milestones are achieved through some smaller tasks.   work breakdown structure or the WBS simplifies the effective identification of the resources as well as skills that are going to be required in order to complete the tasks in order to achieve a certain deliverable (Coeurderoy, Guilmot and Vas 2014). This in turn helps in the faster determination of the right people and resources for the tasks.

Cost Benefit Analysis

There are numerous techniques that are used for the investigating the requirements for any proposed information system.  Some of them which can be used for the organization are discussed below;

One to one meetings:  This is one of the most widely used requirement gathering techniques. In this technique the development team asks different kinds of questions. This questions can be open-ended, follow-on questions or probing. In this way, the process will help to elucidate different stakeholder’s requirements from the proposed system.  The advantages of this process are, it helps in collection of good information while interacting with stakeholders (Schwalbe 2015). Also the probable users do not feel inhibited about what they need from the system or their privation of knowledge in certain areas.

Brainstorming: Brainstorming may be used for individuals or for a group of users. Ideas from the users are collected after which they are reviewed / analysed. After analysis some of the ideas are included within the system requirements wherever the ideas seem to be relevant. Ideas are self-generated and can come from what stakeholders have experienced or seen anywhere else.

Use cases: The use cases related to the specific process depicts how a certain process works, who are involved in the process. From the use cases the process is described from the users point of view and what kind of improvement they want.

Prototyping: Prototyping technique includes the process of collecting initial requirements for the proposed system and build a prototype by using those initial requirements.  This helps the stakeholders to see a potential solution.

Conclusions

Every segment of any information system development project deals with the prospects to streamline different business operations while reduce the cost related to those. In addition to that the use of the information system improves performance of different processes by providing the right information available at the right time whenever required. Readily accessible data can help the management of the organization to make the right decisions at the right time for the business.

 In this project I learned about the importance of the scheduling of the tasks in a project in order to make it successful.  In addition to that the use of the different requirement gathering techniques will also have helped me to refine the requirements for an information system.

References

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Coeurderoy, R., Guilmot, N. and Vas, A., 2014. Explaining factors affecting technological change adoption: A survival analysis of an information system implementation. Management Decision, 52(6), pp.1082-1100.

Eason, K.D., 2014. Information technology and organisational change. CRC Press.

Kateb, M., Swies, R., Obeidat, B. and Maqableh, M., 2015. An Investigation on the Critical Factors of Information System Implementation in Jordanian Information Technology Companies. European Journal of Business and Management, 7(36), pp.11-28.

Liu, Y., Zhan, L., Zhang, Y., Markham, P.N., Zhou, D., Guo, J., Lei, Y., Kou, G., Yao, W., Chai, J. and Liu, Y., 2016. Wide-area-measurement system development at the distribution level: An FNET/GridEye example. IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, 31(2), pp.721-731.

Nguyen, L., Bellucci, E. and Nguyen, L.T., 2014. Electronic health records implementation: an evaluation of information system impact and contingency factors. International journal of medical informatics, 83(11), pp.779-796.

Schwalbe, K., 2015. Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.

Sligo, J., Gauld, R., Roberts, V. and Villa, L., 2017. A literature review for large-scale health information system project planning, implementation and evaluation. International journal of medical informatics, 97, pp.86-97.