System Development Life Cycle

Johnston & Brothers is a consultancy firm specialising in home loan advice and brokering services. It has offices in Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton, Dunedin, and Christchurch.

Recently Mark, the managing director, decided their accounting information system needed to be replaced to enable quicker processing of customers' home loan applications. Mark thinks it is a good idea to hire an external vendor to develop a new AIS that fits his requirements, which includes: i) online access, ii) real-time processing of information, and iii) having more than 100 staff using the system at the same time. He calls a friend from university days who is now the owner-manager of an IT company, EzySystems, and gets his agreement to develop the system at a "reasonable" price. Mark delegates the supervision of the project to the IT manager, Blair, who was recruited 6 months ago.

Testing of the system using some demo transactions and customer information was done with Mark, Blair, and the Chief Financial Officer, who all seemed very impressed with the system's attractive interface and accessibility from any device. As it was already past the original deadline, Blair pushed for the system to go live across all the offices on 1 March. The vendor created online tutorials to introduce staff to the new AIS but no actual face-to-face training took place. The burden of answering all staff queries and problems fell onto Blair and the three staff in the IT team, who knew very little about the new AIS. It was discovered after the system went live, that it was not compatible with the credit verification systems of some banks. This resulted in significant delays in credit checking procedures and hence lengthened the processing of customer home loan applications. The vendor, EzySystems, applied a quick fix to this problem by rewriting part of the system coding. This fix, however, resulted in regular system crashes when retrieving a customer's transactional history. Frustrated with the vendor's performance, Blair allowed his IT staff to directly approve change requests from different offices and code the changes into the system accordingly.

Mark and his team believe that the new AIS is faulty and demanded compensation. However, EzySystems maintained that the system has met Mark's original specifications and hence there is no technical problem with the system itself. EzySystems argued that it was the ignorance and lack of engagement from Johnston & Brothers that caused the problems.

Required:

Using the SDLC framework:

a) Identity AND discuss the problems during the system analysis and design of the new AIS.

b) Identity AND discuss the problems in choosing the vendor for developing the new AIS.

c) Identity AND discuss the problems during the system implementation and maintenance

of the new AIS.

d) Recommend changes to Johnston & Brothers system planning and management that would enable a successful system development in the future.