Information Systems Life Cycle Running a Photography

Information Systems Life Cycle

Running a photography printing store requires various resources and of particular import are the human resources that manage and operate the various business processes therein. However, keeping track of the employees' attendance via the manual system of punch cards has been a challenge due to lost cards, inaccurate hours, and employees punching in other employees. To remedy the situation, implementing a computerized time entry system is being considered. There is no automated system of choice yet despite the availability of various ones such as biometrics, proximity cards and others. In order to determine the viability of migrating from the manual time entry system into an automated one, it is critical to apply the systems development life cycle into the initiative.

The systems development life cycle or SDLC comprise of various phases depending upon the type of methodology used. The most basic SDLC methodology has four phases composed of planning, analysis, design and implementation stages. The term "system life cycle" can be applied to many kinds of endeavor and is used to describe the process by which an existing information system is replaced with another system (Technology UK, 2011). In planning for the automated time entry system, it is important to first identify the business value of the initiative whereby the benefits of the new system will be measured against the old system. Thus, a feasibility study is required and while doing so, a work plan is being develop to determine the extent of the automation project. Before planning a new system, it is important that the current system be evaluated carefully and thoroughly (Hall, 2004). There has to be a comparison with regards to the disadvantages and advantages of the present and the future systems.

From the planning phase or stage, the analysis stage gathers the business requirements of the time entry system. In this case, automating the system is to mitigate the problems brought about by the manual system as detailed previously. In this stage, process modeling and data modeling are done with particular emphasis on "system components, the categories of requirements and system views (Bender RBT Inc., 2003). With the time entry system, this becomes easier because of the number of already implemented systems and merely evaluating them will provide a lot of inputs for this phase.

The design stage focuses on high level design like, what programs are needed and how are they going to interact, low-level design (how the individual programs are going to work), interface design (what are the interfaces going to look like) and data design (what data will be required) (Startvbdotnet.com, 2010). At this phase, there is already a general idea of how the automated time entry system will look like and the various functionalities therein such as mode of data capture (i.e. biometrics, proximity cards, etc.), storage of data, and various processes involve in the system from start to finish. There are several outputs during the design stage and some of these are the final design selection, architecture design, interface design, data storage design, and program design.