ICT393: Discuss the Advantages and Disadvantages of Meeting system Requirements with Commercial Software: Advanced Business Analysis and Design Assignment, MU, Singapore

Learning Objectives

After completing this topic you should be able to:

• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of meeting system requirements with commercial software
• Discuss the problems with subjective approaches to the evaluation of software during software acquisition
• Describe the types of criteria that should be considered when evaluating software
• Use the weighted score method to evaluate software

Background

Some organizations use very ad hoc approaches to selecting and acquiring software that may result in them not being aware of appropriate products, or in choosing non-optimal software. Using a systematic approach to software evaluation is important to ensure that software that meets organizational requirements.

Later this trimester you will analyze and model a business process from a real organization and then design improvements to it. The modeling will be done using a visual modeling language for representing processes called BPMN 2.0 (see Topic 5). Undertaking business process modeling and improvement requires appropriate modeling software. This assessment is intended to give you practical experience with evaluating software and also with report writing to document the evaluation process.

To do

To successfully complete this assignment, you should:

1. Read the Topic 8 material on software evaluation and acquisition. This will introduce you to the notions of evaluation criteria and the weighted score approach.

2. Investigate criteria that might be important in making a decision about which modeling software package to recommend.  You should consider what you will need to do to complete the modeling in the Business Process Management assignment (your 2^nd assignment) and also what has been written by others about selecting this kind of software.

3. Choose the set of criteria to be used in the evaluation (note: there must be at least 6). You will need to justify the choice of each criterion in your report.

4. Determine the relative importance of each of these criteria for choosing a tool to undertake the Business Process Management assignment (your 2^nd assignment). The outcome of this will be a relative weighting for each criterion.

5. Identify 3 possible modeling packages that support BPMN 2.0 – these will be your alternatives. Microsoft Visio should be one of them. You must be able to get access to all of them for the purposes of the evaluation – this could be by downloading a full copy (e.g. obtain Visio from Azure Dev Tools), obtaining a trial copy, or getting permission to test it on someone else’s machine.

6. Use the weighted score method to evaluate your alternatives using the criteria and weightings you have specified. An Excel spreadsheet should be used to support the evaluation and identify which product has the highest ranking. This should use the variation of the weighted score method that includes raw scores and final scores for each criterion (see Topic 8 slides).

7. Determine which modeling software package you recommend.

8. Create a report based on your evaluation. This must follow the specified structure (see below).