Background: Barbara Singleton, manager of western regional sales at the WAMAP Co

Question

Background:

Barbara Singleton, manager of western regional sales at the WAMAP Company, requested that the IS department develop a sales force management andtracking system that would enable her to better monitor the performance of her sales staff . Unfortunately, owing to the massive backlog of work facing the IS department, her request was given a low priority. Aft er six months of inaction by the IS department, Barbara decided to take matters into her own hands. Based on the advice of friends, Barbara purchased simple database soft ware and constructed a sales force management and tracking system on her own. Although Barbara’s system has been “completed” for about six weeks, it still has many features that do not work correctly, and some functions are full of errors. Barbara’s assistant is so mistrustful of the system that she has secretly gone back to using her oldpaper-based system, because it is much more reliable. Over dinner one evening, Barbara complained to a systems analyst friend, “I don’t know what went wrong with this project. It seemed pretty simple to me. Th ose IS guys wanted me to follow this elaborate set of steps and tasks, but I didn’t think all that really applied to a PC-based system. I just thought I could build this system and tweak it around until I got what I wanted without all the fuss and bother of the meth- odology the IS guys were pushing. I mean, doesn’t that just apply to their big, expensive systems?”

Assuming you are Barbara’s systems analyst friend, how would you respond to her complaint?

Explanation / Answer

Information systems must meet the requirements and the design methodology adopted in the organization to make it work every time it is needed and produce what is desired without an error. The use of standardized system fails to meet these requirements of reliability if it is not able to produce reports correctly.

To ensure this, irrespective of the size of the system the systems should be designed with the use of predefined and elaborate set of steps and tasks to make sure everyone understands the methodology. This also helps in operating and maintenance of the system if the system is not performing as it is intended to perform.

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