What is System Analysis ?

Ans.

Computers are fast becoming our way of life and one cannot imagine life without computers in today’s world. You go to a railway station for reservation, you want to web site a ticket for a cinema, you go to a library, or you go to a bank, you will find computers at all places. Since computers are used in every possible field today, it becomes an important issue to understand and build these computerized systems in an effective way.

Building such systems is not an easy process but requires certain skills and capabilities to understand and follow a systematic procedure towards making of any information system. For this, experts in the field have devised various methodologies. Waterfall model is one of the oldest methodologies. Later Prototype Model, Object Oriented Model, Dynamic Systems Development Model, and many other models became very popular for system development. For anyone who is a part of this vast and growing Information Technology industry, having basic understanding of the development process is essential.

Systems analysis is the study of sets of interacting entities, including computer systems analysis. This field is closely related to requirements analysis or operations research. It is also “an explicit formal inquiry carried out to help someone (referred to as the decision maker) identify a better course of action and make a better decision than he might otherwise have made.”

There are a variety of systems where system analysis would be required. The needs can be symbolically be represented in terms of the type or the kind of systems. The systems can be classified as shown in Table.

Table: Types of Systems

Data processing systems	The data already exists but needs processing to achieve certain results. The focus is on computing.
Transaction Processing systems	Processing of transaction using some stored data and business rules. The focus is on the transaction execution.
Functional systems	The production, sales, purchase, and finance systems, where several transactions and stored data is used to produce certain information. The focus is on the Operations Management.
Integrated systems	More than one system is processed together to produce an updated status and business results, where the systems are networked and interfaced. The focus is on process management across the business functions.
Enterprise management	It is a set of systems functioning in the respective areas, playing a local service role, as well as providing service inputs to other systems in the organisation. The focus is on decision support for strategic management to achieve enterprise goals and mission.

The role of the system analyst to fulfil this requirement is different as compared to the role played by him in the seventies and eighties. The system analyst now has to play the role of a business analyst, technology expert and a consultant, giving a solution to the business needs of the information requirement. The nature of the solution is not of a micro level but of a macro level. The information systems’ users are more in the middle and the top management and less in the lower level of the organisation as their role is taken over by the system itself.

The systems analysis and design, therefore, has become more complex, as most of the systems are open systems and probabilistic in nature as against the closed, deterministic systems experienced in the seventies and eighties.

Systems analysis is an in-depth study of end user information needs that producer’s functional requirement that is used as the basis for the design of a new information system. The final product of systems analysis is a set of system requirements for a proposed information system (these are also called the functional specifications or the functional requirements).

(1) Analysis of the Organizational Environment : An Organizational environment analysis is an important first step in systems analysis. How can you improve an information system if you know very little about the organizational environment in which that system is located? That’s why one has to know about the organization, its management structure, its people, its business activities, the environmental systems it must deal with, and its current information systems.

(2) Analysis of the Present System: Before a new system is designed, it is important to study the system that will be improved or replaced (if there is one). One needs to analyze how this system uses hardware, software, and people resources to convert the data resources of the organization into information products for end users. One should analyze how these system resources are used to accomplish the information system activities of input, processing, output, storage and control. Then, in the systems design stage, one can specify what these resources, products, and activities should be in the system one is designing.

(3) System Requirements Analysis: This is one of the most difficult steps of the system. In it one must try first to determine own (or an end user’s) specific information needs (this is sometimes called needs analysis or user-requirements analysis). Second, one must try to determine the information processing capabilities required for each system activity (input, processing, output, storage, control) to meet these information needs (this is sometimes called functional requirements analysis). Finally, one should try to develop logical system requirements. These are end user information requirements that are not tied to the physical resources of hardware, software, and people that end users presently use or might use in the future. The difficulty of the requirements analysis step is one of the major reasons for the development of alternative methods of systems development, such as packaged systems and prototyping.

(4) System Requirements: the following are the few examples of system requirements:

(i) Input Requirements

(ii) Output Requirements

(iii) Processing Requirements

(iv) Storage Requirements

(v) Control Requirements