week 12

1. What was the most difficult assessment item you completed in COIS20025 this term (not counting the examination which is not until the examination period)?

ans. Well, everything is fine except for Annotated bibiliography blog post of week 8. This is really hard in terms of writing.

2. What was difficult about it and how would you suggest it could be improved?

ans. Ofcourse I understood what Annotated bibiliography means, but it is really difficult write reasonably good number of lines for all the 6 references of the essay. I did not understand what is the use of learning how to write annotated bibiliography. Instead, we would be benefited if we were given some tasks on sytem documentation.

3. Name three (3) things you learnt this term in COIS20025.

ans. Traditional approach to Information System development, How to use MicroSoft Visio and How to create, post, manage and maintain blogs in the internet.

4. What career are you working towards?

ans. I am aspiring to become an IT professional.

5. How will you be able to use the knowledge and skills learnt in this course in your future career?

ans. There is lot of stuff in the prescribed book to remember and recollect while facing an interview. This course really is a foundation for us and helps to build-up our career in IT or IS. Very fundamental concepts were covered in the course and they really helps us to develop a clear understanding of system development. And we got a chance to learn parallelly about System development, Database development and structured programming which are interlinked, in the same term. This developed concept clarity and improved our subject knowledge as well.  

 

week 10

Q. Give one exampleS of each of the maintenace task that might be needed once CHIS is in operation.

Ans. The economic life of a system is determined by the ongoing maintenance expenses and proper system maintenance demands well trained professionals. These maintenance activities can be categorized into corrective, adaptive, perfective and preventive maintenance.

After implementing the Child health information system, problems must be detected, investigated and resolved by corrective maintenance. For example, let us consider that a child visits to a particular health centre for the first time and a new record is created for that child and required vaccination or medication is provided to the child after issuing a unique child_id. These details are also stored in the corresponding child records. If the child visits a diiferent health centre  next time and produces his unique id, his record must be accessed by this health centre as well to update child information according to the visit. If this does not happen, it is a sytem failure and such problems arise depending upon the type of implementation. There can be other minor errors like improper format for data elements such as grade of the child, age of the child where the required grade ranges from 1-10 but the system is accepting alphabets and age field does not accept both years and months but it is required to store the accurate vaccination info of child. Such requests are usually raised byt the health centre employees and these requests are prioritized and scheduled by the system administrator or review committee. After careful analysis, design and testing the changes are implemented.

In future the Health department may consider the medication details to be stored in the system and also want to make the sytem to be accessible  to the aid donor organisations to view the performance reports and services. These new features or system capabilities come under adaptive maintenance. When compared to the new system developed, adaptive maintenance is more difficult because the enhancements must work within the constraints of the existing system.

To improve the system response time, efficiency and reliability, perfective maintenance is initiated by the IT department. This improves maintenance and reduces the risk. As an example, if the staff at the health centre enters invalid input at any of the data fields like gender(other than M/F), grade(not in the range of 1-10), date of visit other than the specified format, a pop-up window should notify the error message to the user to enter the data in a valid format and range.  Such small things when taken care of improves the efficiency of users as well as the system. Also abnormal termination of program due to invalid inputs must be avoided.

Preventive maintenance requires analysis of trouble causing areas to avoid the problems. For example, if two or three child records are opened at a time on the system, then the system performance has to be taken care of and see that it does not slow down. If there are multiple health centres sending their periodic reports on the performance to the health department, the network traffic must be effectivel y managed and time taken for sending a reprot and processinga request must me considerably low. This should not worsen the user satisfaction. The system down time and total cost of ownership must be reduced.

 

week 9

Q. Explain the implications of using each of the system changeover methods at Health centres to change from the existing manual system to the new CHIS.

Ans. The process of putting the new information system online, retiring the old one is termed as system changeover. Depending upon the factors like risk level involved, maintenance costs and type of the system developed, different changeover methods are adapted by the companies. A choice is made by the analysts, management, IT staff and users among the four changeover methods:

Direct cutover method

Parallel operation

pilot operation and

phased operation

Direct cutover causes the system changeover from old system to new system immediately. Since the existing system is manula in the case of Child Heatlth Information System project, there is no risk involved in shifting to the new system immediately. This cutover approach offers less maintenace cost to the Health Department. Since CHIS is an in-house application there are some initial implementation problems involved with the new system and the health centre employees has to get acquainted with the operating procedures and techniques. Even if the newly implemented system fails, there is not much problem in continuing with the old one until the errors are corrected. Since CHIS is not a commercial project and much business issues are not involved with this, the new system can be implemented immediately without considering the monthly, quarterly and annual financial cycles.

In parallel operation changeover method, both the old and the new information systems operate fully for a specified period. Since there is no existing information system in health centres and health department, there is no question of running both the systems in parallel and compare the performance of the new system with the old one. Ofcourse the Health Department has an option to maintain the manual records if it has some suspicions in the initial stages of implementation. Parallel maintenance  costs are negligible here, because the existing system is manual and it is a non business scenario.

Pilot operation changeover involves implementing the new system at a selected health centre called the pilot site and observe its performance. During this period the other health centres as well as the pilot centre continue with the existing manual system. After proving successful, direct cutover method is used to implement the new system everywhere. But there are no special benefits involved in implementing this changeover method with CHIS because there is no risk of old system failure and maintenace costs are also not high as the existing system is manual.

New system is implemented in stages or modules in phased operation changeover method. The entire Child health information system is divided into subsystems such as update records system, inventory maintenance system, national reporting system. In the beginning, only update records sytem can be implemented, and after assessing its performance at all the health centres, the other subsystems can be implemented. But these modules when implemented individually cannot meet the objective of the Health Department in maintaining a central level Child Health Information System.Phased implementation demands more technical resources at every phase and might cause a problem in CHIS.

week 8

There are nearly ten references for my academic essay but here I am just writing the annotated bibiliography for four references. Iam  still gathering the required information for the essay and the following resources were completely referred to build up the essay.

 

Shelly, G, Chasman, T & Rosenblatt, H 2007, Systems analysis and design, 7^th edn, Thomson Course Technology, Boston.

 

Shelly et al. systematically explains the traditional approach to systems development by concentrating on all the stages involved with thhis approach. To help understand traditional approach in abetter way, this book presents some case studies and explains the structured analysis techniqued applying for that particular case. This helped me to develop a clear idea of structured approach and describe about it in the essay. However, their work is totally traditional oriented and object-oriented approach is discussed peripherally. This helped me to develop an overview of OOAD but requires further study to understand it better. To compare and contrast both the approaches, knowledge of both the approaches is desired.

Whitten, JL, Bentley, LD & Dittman, KC 2001, Systems analysis and design methods, 5^th edn,  McGraw-Hill & Irwin, Boston.

 

Whitten et al. described OOAD methods clearly through UML diagramming techniques. Various diagrams used in different stages of OOA and design are explained and also the concepts such as encapsulation,polymorphism and data abstraction that are unique to OOA approach are discussed. Eventhough very few chapters are dedicated to describe the object-oriented methodology, they develop some clarity about the topic. Like any other book, most of the content is about structured analysis but comparative study about both the approaches is directly not available. Also I could not find the merits and de-merits associated with structured analysis and object-oriented approach.

 

Mostafavi, H 1998, ‘performance effects of applying design patterns to a telecommunication system ’, (Online ProQuest).

 

Mostafavi in his study on the performance effects of applying design patterns to a telecommunication system practically discussed some pitfalls associated with structured approach and described how they can be overcomed with object approach. Eventhough his study is specific to a particular topic, I could find some useful information regarding the de-merits associated with the structured approach and the areas in which object approach is effective. His work contributed to my comparative study of both the approaches.

 

Rob, MA 2006, ‘Dilemma between the structured and object-oriented approaches to systems analysis and design’, The journal of computer information systems, Vol.46, Iss.3, pp 32-43, (Online ProQuest).

 

Rob, in his journal article discussed about the content of various system analysis and design text books and how that content is helpful in teaching both traditional and object methods to students. He raised the need of seperate text books for both the approaches to avoid confusion among readers and authors as well. In his article he discussed some draw backs of object oriented design concepts and this discussion helped me to gather some information about the de-merits associated with object-oriented methodology. In fact this is the only resource that helped me find out the draw back of object approach with justification in the phase of implementing the database.