Case study

Shorecliff College is a liberal arts college located on the West Coast. You are the systems analyst assigned from the college IT department to conduct the systems analysis phase of the development of a new listing system for the school's housing office. Background Based on your earlier recommendations, the housing office decided to continue the systems development process for a new listing system. Now, at the end of the systems analysis phase, you are ready to prepare system requirements document and give a presentation to the housing office. You must examine tangible costs and benefits to determine the economic feasibility of several alternatives. If the housing office decides to go ahead with the development process, the system either can be developed in-house or a vertical package can be purchased and configured to meet the needs of the office. Housing listings are created by an employee at the housing office. While the demands on her time vary throughout the year, based on previous work logs kept by employees in the office you determine that the time spent maintaining the manual system (creating listing sheets for the various binders, copying, and filing listings in binders) by this employee works out to an average of 25 hours of overtime per month. This employee is paid $22 per hour, including overhead. Housing listings are pulled throughout the month, and all listings are reviewed once a month to delete those more than two months old. Currently, the once a month reviews are done by a student worker who spends 20 hours a month going through the 15 binders at the housing office and pulling all old listings for review by a housing office staff member. This student is paid $12 per hour, including overhead. A new system would conduct this review automatically and generate a list for review. Your estimates indicate that the housing office can expect to have staff spend 4 hours a week performing maintenance, file backups, and updating of the new system, at $22 per hour. The university has lost revenue on some of its rental properties, having them lie idle for a month because of listings pulled either erroneously by staff, or deliberately by people using the housing listing service. Estimates put the amount of lost revenue due to listing problems such as these at three percent of anticipated yearly rental receipts. In the current year, the anticipated rental receipts total $340,000. Rents are increased four percent a year across the board.Based on your research, you originally estimated that an in-house development project could be completed in about three weeks. This time estimate is based on 35 hours a week for you and another analyst from the IT department. The IT department uses a charge- back rate of $35 per hour for work for other university departments. As an alternative to in-house development, a vertical software package is available for about $9,000, including an on-site day of training and technical support for the first year. If the department buys the package, it would take you about four weeks to install, configure, and test it, working full-time. The vendor provides free support during the first year of operation, but then the housing office must sign a technical support agreement at an annual cost of $1,000. Training and support for an in-house system would require 30 hours from a training specialist in the IT department, billed at $30 per hour, to develop training materials and provide training. The training materials would be added to documentation created during in-house development, and a training session for IT support staff would be provided, at an additional $10 per hour charge. Training and technical support for the first year for the vertical software package is included in the initial price. For both the in-house development and the vertical software package, the necessary hardware will cost about $3,000. Network upgrading, necessary for either option, has been estimated at $5,000 by the network operations group. In your view, the useful life of the system will be about five years, including the year in which the system becomes operational. Question- 1. Provide an overview of the proposed system, including costs and benefits, (Sell the customer on the potential benefits of the proposed system). Question-2. Conduct feasibility analysis, using payback analysis (identifying payback period) and/or Indicating ROI (Return on Investment). Question-3. Provide brief explanation of the various alternatives that should be investigated if development continues, including in-house development and any other possible strategies. Identify advantages and disadvantages of each alternative strategy.