INF 1341 • Systems Analysis and Process Innovation
In this course, you will carry out a series of assignments to apply systems analysis techniques to real world settings
University of Toronto • Faculty of Information
INF 1341 • Systems Analysis and Process Innovation
Assignment 1: Initial exploration of a study site
Due Date: Friday, Sept. 20, 11:59 pm
This assignment counts for 20% of the course grade.
(Individual work)
In this course, you will carry out a series of assignments to apply systems analysis techniques to
real world settings. As a preliminary step, in this Assignment 1, you will identify a suitable
organization as your primary study site. Your work in Assignment 2 will be based primarily on
information you collect about this site, and possibly prior knowledge you have about similar
organizational settings, as well as published literature.
In subsequent assignments, as you join others in a team, your primary site will be viewed as part of
a larger setting, which will allow your team to study interactions among information systems across
organizations. Thus, in selecting your primary site, you are also selecting the industry/business/
economic sector that it is associated with, e.g., healthcare, retail, financial services, etc.
I. Doing the Assignment
Find an organizational setting in which you expect information systems to have potential impact,
allowing you to explore opportunities for process automation, innovation, and fundamental
transformation. The organization can be one that you are already familiar with, for example, your
current or former place of work. You may also explore prospective sites through friends,
acquaintances, relatives, etc.
Typically, you will be looking for a work setting in which a number of people working in different
capacities produce some joint output or result, i.e., a “business process” or work process. This can
be a department or section in a large organization (e.g., customer relations) or a work process that
cuts across several departments (e.g., contract proposals in an engineering firm). The organization
can be a business corporation, or non-profit such as a hospital, a school, a university, a government
agency, etc. It can also be a small business (e.g., a retail store, a professional office, etc.) Volunteer
and community organizations often also have information systems needs, e.g., professional
associations, community centres, student organizations, clubs, etc. Each student should select a
different site – different organizations, or different parts within a larger organization.
The site should be able to provide you with the information you need to carry out your systems
analysis. Ideally, you should have contact(s) in the organization who you can interview. For
example, you will want to know what the perceived problems are in their current operations, and
what areas they believe offer opportunities for improvement. You will want to know their
organizational objectives, criteria or measures of success, and the basic ins and outs of their
operations. In this course, the emphasis will be on the early stage of systems analysis. You will not
be expected to produce a complete system specification.
The work process should contain some recurring tasks that are amenable to information systems
support, e.g., storing data in databases according to some data model, performing updates, queries,
calculations on the data, etc. As part of this initial exploration, you are required to develop a BPMN
model of the selected work process. It should show the main activities carried out by the
participants and their interactions. It should be at a level of detail where some issues and concerns
about the process can be revealed.