In the previous chapter, you learned that an efficient and effective information system (IS) is composed of people, processes, structure and technology. However, the process by which you can create an IS was not covered. This chapter describes the efficient and effective development of the technology part of an IS; other chapters to follow will describe the activities required for the people, process and structure aspects of the IS.
The approach we follow is to first define in general terms the sequence of activities required to go from the decision to create a new IS to its implementation and subsequent maintenance. We then describe the most important issues or difficulties that you may encounter during the process, based on the experience developers have encountered on projects in the past. The rest of the chapter – the bulk of it, in fact – is devoted to describing for each activity possible approaches to resolving the issues and avoiding the difficulties. These approaches are not the only ones that are possible; those that are mentioned here have been selected because they have been successful in the past, are documented in the literature (so you can learn more about them by consulting various reference works), and enjoy widespread acceptance in real-life IS departments.
Unless otherwise indicated, we assume that the IS being developed is a web-based system that processes business transactions of some kind, and that the project is of medium size – say 5 to 25 people on the team. This means that we do not consider the development of websites that are purely informational, nor for personal productivity, nor that result in a software product for sale to individuals or organizations.
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