Developing Information Systems

In this and the following chapters, we will discuss different approaches concerning how an organization can obtain its information systems once the decision in favor of a system has been made.

While chapter 7 will deal with buying and introducing software that was developed by others, in particular standard software, the focus in this chapter is on how to build completely new information systems or new modules that extend existing information systems within an organization. By “new modules” we mean that significant development effort is required in order for the project to pass all stages of the software development process.

In contrast to this, limited extensions of a running information system are considered part of the maintenance and support stages. Adding functionality to a new standard software system will be discussed in chapter 7, as part of the customizing process.

The perspective taken in this chapter is that the starting point for the development effort is an approved project proposal (cf. section 2.2.1); i.e., a managerial level decision to launch a project for building a system inhouse has been made. If no restrictions existed, we could say that the project starts from scratch. In the real world, however, such restrictions often limit the degrees of freedom substantially.