System Developer - Essay Example

Outline and Essay Exploring the Role of a System Developer Roll No: Teacher: 24th July 2009 Part 1 Introduction Information System refers to a system of people, data records and activities that process the data and information in an organization, and it includes the organization's manual and automated processes. There are various types of information systems, for example: transaction processing systems, decision support systems, knowledge management systems, database management systems, and office information systems. Information systems are typically designed to enable humans to perform tasks for which the human brain is not well suited, such as: handling large amounts of information, performing complex calculations, and controlling many simultaneous processes. Information technology is having a radical and culture changing affect on the way we work and live our lives. A system developer is a person or organization concerned with all facets of the information system development process- wider than design and coding including some aspects of product management. System development is the set of activities that results in a system product. System development may include research, new development, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in system products. A system developer can bring revolution in technology using the right approach. The technology which surrounds almost everyone in the modern society, affects both work and leisure activities. Technology contains information that many would rather it did not have. Over the years, technologies have been invented to address society's problems or to fulfil its growing desire for speed and convenience. We wake to an alarm clock, cook breakfast on a gas-powered or electric stove, and go to school by car, bus, or bicycle. We work on computers in lighted classrooms, complete our assignments using pen and paper, and perhaps watch television or listen to music before going to sleep. The technology which is just now beginning to be manipulated and harnessed is affecting the minds of small children and adolescents in ways that could be harmful. It is affecting our immediate future. It also gives another form of communication and exchange of information which was not available before, information that is both good and bad. Banking is a big example of how does introduction of technology can affect the people. The new era technology-savvy banks offer several innovative products at the front office for the customers based on technology. Multi channel offerings like machine based (ATMs and pc-Banking), card based (credit/Debit/Smart cards), Communication based (Tele-Banking and Internet Banking) ushered in Anytime and Anywhere Banking by the banks. Earlier all we did at a bank was to deposit and withdraw money. Service standards were pathetic, but all we could do was to grin and bear it. Technology is revolutionizing every field of human endeavour and activity. The internet banking is changing the banking industry and is having the major effects on banking relationship. Plastic money was a delicious gift, giving respite from carrying too much cash. Now several new features are added to plastic money to make it more attractive. It works on formula "purchase now, pay later". Another field evolving is mobile banking. Taking advantages of the booming market for mobile phones and cellular services, several banks have introduced mobile banking which allows customers to perform banking transactions using their mobile phones. Mobile banking has been especially targeted at people who travel frequently and to keep track of their banking transactions. Technology has been one of the most important factors for the development of mankind. Information and communication technology is the major advent in the field of technology which is used for accessing, processing, storage and dissemination of information electronically. Banking industry is fast growing with the use of technology in the form of ATMs, on-line banking, Telephone banking, Mobile banking etc. Plastic card is one of the banking products that caters to the needs of retail segment and has seen its number grow in geometric progression in recent years. This growth has been strongly supported by the development in the field of technology, without which this could not be possible of course and it will change our lifestyle in coming years. The growth of technology greatly depends on culture around. Culture is the set of beliefs and assumptions associated with a community. Culture creates a society. Culture can have major affects on technology. Banking sector is not an exception. The society's requirement introduced so much technical aspects in banking. Like people's expectation for time convenience. Time-pressured consumers have rejected the concept of "business hours" and are beginning to demand access to information, transactions and service when it's convenient for them--not just when it's convenient for the provider. Many banks have already responded to this change with evening, Saturday and even Sunday hours, as well as 24-hour telephone banking. The second change in consumer convenience expectations ties back to location, but expands the concept. Cellular phones and ATMs in shopping malls and airports around the world, are introducing consumers to having access to products and services when they need them-regardless of where they are at the time. A third addition to consumers' expectations of convenience has to do with the "how" of banking. Recent technological developments have expanded the list of devices available to consumers for getting information and conducting transactions. Service providers such as financial institutions and banks, whose profitability depends on sustaining long-term relationships with customers have to develop systems looking at the social, moral, ethical, human aspects of systems development. So the culture (we can say consumer or society) directs how much banks invest in development of new electronic delivery system. There are mainly two engines due to which, the consumer have driving interest in new System development: a new consumer definition of convenience and technology's impact on consumer behaviour. Technology influences minds in good and bad ways. There are many security threats in developing banking systems like fraud transaction, authenticate internet banking, etc. A system developer has to take cultural behaviour in concern when developing a system. Part 2 Role of System Developer Information technology has changed the face of the world and no one negate the fact that information technology is a very significant field. System developer plays a crucial role in terms of information technology and development of information systems. A system developer is a person or organization concerned with all facets of the information system development process- wider than design and coding including some aspects of product management. System development is the set of activities that results in an Information System product. The system developer has to understand both the information needs and the culture of an organisation when developing information systems. Information Information is critical part of building an Information System. Information contains meaning - rather than just standing for, provoking or evoking meaning in others. By gathering proper information, problem can be easily broken down. It helps in understanding, modelling and building of system. Information cannot exist independently of receiving person. Reaction to information is some kind of analysis or at least interpretation. Data becomes 'information' when it is transmitted. Differences between data and information must be preserved. Effective management of an organisation's information requires a complete and consistent description of that data. Information becomes knowledge when it is interpreted. Information is simply the vehicle by which we attempt to provoke a human response. Information on its own is quite static and lifeless. Why do we attach so much importance to information' Because without information, we would not have any 'triggers' to alert us to the need to interpret events. Information has no intrinsic meaning but when it is interpreted by humans, it becomes knowledge. But how is it interpreted and is the interpretation correct' This question introduces concept of understanding culture of organization in field of System Development. Culture Organizational Culture can be viewed as: the pattern of beliefs, values and learned ways of coping with experience that have developed during the course of an organisation's history, and which tend to be manifested in its material arrangements and in the behaviours of its members. It establishes organization's goals - how they should be fulfilled and how that should be measured, how problems should be resolved. It establishes relationships between employees and the organization. It has its own reward system. It defines who has power and managerial control. The organization has its own way to deal with external environment. People who share a common culture see the world in a similar way. Organisational Semiotics Traditional system development methodologies don't consider organization, their values and behaviour in development of system. Specification and validation of requirements determine the success of the information system development. Moreover, the social, cultural and organisational aspects of the problem must have a more decisive role in the development processes than the technology itself. Organisational Semiotics (OS) aims to provide new methodologies, techniques and tools to the development of information systems and organisations by applying semiotic theories and studies, therefore offering a new perspective on the field, which incorporates technical and social aspects. It depicts what is the impact of society and culture upon the building and using of an information system. Semiotics is the discipline of signs which studies the creation, use and effects of signs. Semiotics studies all types of signs like words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. There is a clear distinction between the sign and its referent depending on the interpreter. This is because different interpreter have different perception about an object. According to Charles Sanders Peirce, "Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign." Signs allow us to make reference to objects, actions, events and concepts; many of which would have been impossible to represent without them. Stamper's semiotics framework Originally the semiotic framework was divided into pragmatics, semantics and syntactic. Pragmatics deals with intentions, communications and the like, Semantics dealing with meaning and Syntactic with formal structures and languages. Stamper (1973) added three more layers. The social world, which studies how the signs affect the society, like law and culture, the empirics where the statistical properties of sign are studied (Liu, 2000) and the physical world which studies more technical concepts like signals and traces. The main benefit of the semiotic framework divides the problems, based on six areas, social, pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, empiric and physical allowing assessment of one area at a time, increasing the possibility of thorough analysis. The semiotic framework is used for semiotic analysis which illustrates how the organisation works in all six layers of the semiotic framework, also drawing attention to key issues within various layers. Stamper developed the Methods for Eliciting, Analysing and Specifying User's Requirements (MEASUR) to deal with infrastructure analysis, requirement analysis, construction and audit of information system development, shown in Fig. 1. It is ideal for moving from the world of signs to the world of actions. The central idea in MEASUR is that organisations are information systems and their specification can be defined as social norms. MEASUR consists of five major methods that are dealing with the social, pragmatic and semantic layers of the semiotic framework. Those methods are the Problem Articulation methods (PAM), Semantic Analysis method (SAM), Norm Analysis Method (NAM), Communication and Control Analysis and Meta-Systems Analysis. The system developer can make benefit of the Stamper's Semiotics Framework in order to make his role much better in terms of system development. If the system developer follows all the following stages of Stamper's Semiotics Framework, he can be helped to a great extent in his job of system development. Each of five methods is explained below with respect to banking system and the role of system developer. PAM (Problem Articulation methods) PAM is used for the infrastructure analysis of the project, where it helps users to identify issues worthy of attention. PAM includes four methods; the first method is the Unit system definition where the complex problem is divided into smaller units and subunits reducing the system's complexity. Each unit consists of organised activities, which consume resources as a part of the main problem. This method can aid the System Developer by clearly defining problems, tasks and responsibilities for each unit that can be analyzed individually or as a group by domain experts increasing the possibility of thorough and accurate analysis. The next method, the stakeholder identification not only identifies the stakeholders but also their needs. The stakeholders are categorized as actors, clients, providers, facilitators, governing body and bystanders. Each stakeholder is prioritised depending on how critical its interaction with the system is for the e-enterprise. The extraction of this analysis shows which requirements should be considered more than the others and in the case of a conflict which should be implemented and which overlooked. Another method is the collateral structuring which can use a unit system from the unit system definition as the focal system and identifies all the service systems. Those collateral systems are used in four cycles; constructing, launching, operating and backup. This method can aid System Developer not only as a checklist ensuring that no system is overlooked but also to locate the boundary of the focal system in a given environment. This method is also useful for financial analysis to calculate the cost of each collateral system plus the cost of the focal system instead of the focal system's cost only. This can also affect management decision e.g. on whether a project should be carried out in house or outsourced and to what extent they can offer backup depending on what in house skills they possess. The last method is the validation framing which is aimed at understanding the user's requirements thereby increasing the possibility of the project being accepted by the user at testing stage. The method performs a full assessment on gain and loses of each stakeholder in relation to the changes that the project will bring. PAM methods divide a complex problem to units and sub units making the implementation simpler, identify all the stakeholders, identify all the collateral systems of each focal system and validate the total system increasing not only the accuracy of the requirement analysis stage but also the user acceptance testing stage. This method can be applied on banking system also. Divide the system to be designed in units, identify all stakeholders of bank and identify their requirements. SAM (Semantic Analysis Method) It is used to elicit and specify user's requirements in a formal and precise form. The main aim of SAM is to identify and represent which agent is capable of doing which action. SAM is based on the assumption that a semantic unit can not exist with out an antecedent. The SAM identifies the candidate semantic units from the system requirements (problem definition), to identify the agents (entities that can take legal responsibility) and actions that can be afforded by the agents (affordances). In extent SAM identifies the roles of the agents as well as any determiners. This knowledge can be represented with a surrogate table, NORMA (Language for norms and affordances) or graphically with an ontology chart. After the analysis is complete a Semantic Normal Form schema can be produced as an ontology chart that can be directly mapped to a database schema. The main advantage of this SNF schema is that it is robust, stable and immune to malignant changes. This means that if a system is built based on an SNF compliant schema then, any future changes can be added just by writing new modules, reducing by 80% the cost of a change. Semantic analysis also gives the added advantage of non-destructive updates thereby keeping records of historical changes (temporal). NAM (Norm Analysis Method) This analyses and defines in a formal way (NORMA or Semantic modelling) the norms that govern an organisation The concept behind this method is the ability of norms to act like rules that control when an agent will perform an action. In Banking System solution, if all norms of banks included at semantic modelling time, it can help a lot in development. Norms work hand in hand with the semantic model, in order to define roles, functions, responsibilities and authorities of agents in clear terms. Norm analysis captures the business rules, regulations and other norms ensuring that a mapping as close to the real world is achieved. It is also used in translating the analytical findings to the programmer and other stakeholders. Communication and Control Analysis It helps in analysing the communication network between all the responsible agents and all systems. The various communication messages are classified according to the senders intentions into informative, coordinative or control messages. Meta-System Analysis It evaluates the whole project employing the meta-problem in planning and managing the project. System Developer's role The role of System Developer is changing now-a-days. The system developer must study information needs and cultural behaviour of organization thoroughly during development of system. An Information Systems research is generally concerned with the study of the effects of information systems on the behaviour of individuals, groups, and organizations. He must be aware of constraints that exist like resource, people, money, time etc. The role of system developer is to create a new system that will be an improvement in some way. Any change to old system creates a new system. He must be technically competent. Many other factors affect system development like management structure, technical ability of users, level of education of users, personality and personality clashes, stability of organization, politics, etc. Conclusion All systems exist within and are affected by culture and society. The culture is often complex and not obvious. Information systems engineer should look at the environment (including people, structure, culture, and so on) as well as the technical solutions. The role of system developer is very complex but if he follows Stamper's Semiotics Framework, he can be helped a lot in performing his job of system development by the help of this framework. References Andersen, P. B'gh 1993, "A semiotic approach to programming", In: Andersen, Holmqvist, & Jensen (ed.) (1993), The Computer as Medium, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 16-68. Burton-Jones, Andrew, Storey, Veda C., Sugumaran, Vijayan and Ahluwalia, Punit 2005, A semiotic metrics suite for assessing the quality of ontologies, Data and Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 55, Issue 1, 84 - 102, Viewed 22nd July 2009, Read More