Meredith Corporation publishes books and magazines, owns and operates tele¬ vision stations, and provides a real estate marketing and franchising service. Meredith is dissatisfied with its ability to retrieve correct and timely inventory information from its AIS. Each division either developed its own inventory system or already had one in place when Meredith acquired the AIS. As a result, Meredith has 11 different inven¬ tory systems, which are unable to communicate with each other. Management wants to tie the systems together and have one consistent inventory pool from which to extract the information needed for making good business decisions. Meredith has decided to use prototyping to develop the system.

Required

a. When interviewing Meredith’s personnel, what three key questions would you ask to determine systems requirements? What type of information are you attempting to elicit from each question?

b. What do you think are Meredith’s basic information needs?

c. Explain how the prototyping process would work for Meredith. What would the system developer do during the iterative process step? Why would you want the fewest iterations possible?

d. Would you want this prototype to be operational or nonoperational? Why? If it were an operational prototype, what would have to happen? If it were a nonop¬ erational prototype, how would the prototype be used?

e. Suppose the company decides the prototyped system is not practical, abandons the system, and takes some other approach to solving its inventory problem. Does that mean prototyping is not a valid systems development approach? Explain your answer.