Chapter 2. Gathering and Analyzing Business Requirements

Terms you'll need to understand:

• Business requirements and process

• Gap analysis

• Business process reengineering

• Vertical market

• Critical success factors

• System features

• Data modeling

• Entity Relationship diagram

• Cardinality

• Attribute

• Data type

• Data flow and context diagrams

Techniques you'll need to master:

• Conducting a business process analysis

• Assessing the effectiveness of an organizational structure

• Developing a training plan

• Creating a vision/scope document

• Modeling the data

• Creating a data flow diagram

The requirements-gathering phase is usually considered the most challenging process of any information systems project. If this step is not successfully carried out, every subsequent step in the project development life cycle will be flawed. A key part of this process is determining the business requirements, which describe the business purposes for developing a new computer system or enhancing an existing one. The process begins with gaining a thorough understanding of the current business state, which is essential to your project's success. The current business state is an understanding of how the key functions of your organization, including computer applications, are achieving or attempting to achieve the organization's business goals. You use the current business state as a starting point to determine what needs to change to get to the eventual desired business state. Following that logic, an excellent method for determining what users want the new system to do is comparing the new system to the existing system. By using the current system as your model, you can identify and document problems, determine problem causes, and define new opportunities.