Information System Interview and Analysis

The company for which the system was developed was a mid-sized private insurance company with nationwide presence and a few small subsidiaries. The average age of employees was 37, and average tenure of employment was approximately 10 years. The company had a liberal continuing education policy and paid for education and training as well as providing video-based training on site.

The original system was primarily a transaction system designed to support functional users that serviced credit life insurance policies on personally owned vehicles in response to telephone claim requests. However, the customer requested that strategic information be included in the new system to enable her to do what-if projections and strategic planning, tasks she had been performing manually.

The development of the system was prompted by an unsatisfactory prior system that had been developed by the Information Technology (IT) department with little customer input. The system lacked the functionality that the customer needed and had to be replaced. The project to design a replacement system was actually initiated by a lead systems development manager rather than by the customer, who had become thoroughly disenchanted with IT as a result of the prior unsatisfactory system development project. In the initial meeting where the systems analyst met with the customerùa functional man

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stomer. The reason for this was that policies were being ôbentö to accommodate what the customer wanted. Since she was a disgruntled customer, the new project was intended to smooth over past differences and provide her the functionality she had expected from the prior system. Functional users played a role in the planning process, but for the most part they were represented by the primary customer, who was their supervisor. From time to time, the analyst would review progress to date with them to keep them in the loop and verify that they were in agreement with the work that had been done so far. Post-Implementation Stage. Since the analyst worked very closely with the customer during the entire project from initiation through post-implementation, the customer found that most of her concerns had been addressed adequately right from the beginning. However, there was one function that she had been unable to convince the analyst to incorporate, and this was found to be more important than anticipated. The customerÆs prior system, although extremely inadequate, had allowed her to view a ôsnapshotö of a policy at a particular point in time. An entire screenful of data was captured to show what the status of multiple variables
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Post-Implementation Stage, Information Technology, Background Information, Company Background, Initiation Stage, prior system, system developed, snapshot function, functional users, system designed, systems analyst, historical function, system system, meet strategic, system functional, meet strategic goals, policy event occurred, system lacked functionality, snapshot function customer, function customer staff,
Approximate Word count = 1963
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)