The Systems Life Cycle

Why build new IT systems
1. A new IT system may be commissioned for a number of reason
  1. The company might want to improve the quality of a repetitive task. Doing the sam ething over and over is very tiring and tedious for a person. A robotic system may be able to help with this. For instance the car industry makes heavy use of robots in their factories
  2. A new part of the company needs IT support e.g. a new customer service help desk
  3. The organisation has grown and the current system can't cope with the increased demands placed on it.Perhaps the company had only a few customers to start with but now it needs to be able to deal with hundreds of accounts
  4. A competitor has developed a new system or process and the organisation needs something similar in order to offer the same service to customers
  5. Technology might have moved on and new things are possible that couldn't be done with the previous system
  6. The current one is out of date and no longer doing its job effectively
2. IT Systems are used to make the lives of businesses easier
  1. Supermarkets
    1. Payroll systems
    2. Stock control systems
  2. Government
    1. Online census information
    2. Online tax payment system
  3. Hospitals
    1. Appointment systems for outpatients
    2. Pharmacy systems for keeping track of drugs and creating printed prescritions
  4. Banks
    1. Systems for approving or rejecting mortgage applications
    2. Systems for ATM machines
    3. Customer record systems
Problems with new IT systems
1. A survey of over 14,000 organisations showed that where new IT systems were being developed:
  1. 80-90% of systems fail to meet performance goals
  2. 80% of systems are late and over budget
  3. 40% of systems fail or are abandoned
  4. Just 10-20% of business meet all their success criteria
2. As people have learnt from mistakes, a model has been developed and refined over the years to try and maximise the chances of a successful project.
  1. The Systems Life Cycle
The System Life Cycle is a process of stages which occur during the development of a new ICT system
1. If organisations follow the stages of the System Life Cycle, they should be able to avoid many problems.
2. Stages of the System Life Cycle
  1. Definition
  2. Investigation and analysis
  3. Design
  4. Implementation
  5. Testing
  6. Installation
  7. Documentation
  8. Evaluation
  9. Maintenance

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The Systems Life Cycle

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	Created by James Tungate about 6 years ago