Business System Issues - Case Study Example

?Systems Analysis and Design Inserts His/Her Inserts Grade Inserts 21.11 Business System Analysis Rich Picture Annotations 1. The different workers give information to the office clerks for recording keeping. This information includes their clocking in and out time within the companies premises. 2. The clerks do the filing of information for safe keeping. These records are kept within the company’s premises represented by 5. 3. The staffs do appraisal on the different records access the files. These people are supposed to carry out an analysis of the different data on workers. After the analysis they will give an appraisal report. 4. Employees receive their appraisal report. This report will show whether an employee has been attending to duties in the correct manner stipulated by the company. CATWOE checklist from HR manager The appraisal system owned by the human resource office is to provide the senior managers with attendance information. The hr department clerks collect data on an employee’s clock in and out time. The data on the staff attendance is transformed to give an appraisal report for each and every employee. The appraisal is carried out by the human resource manager using the system to provide data on promotion. The system will produce quick reports which will be up to date. The system reduces the time the human resource department takes to do an appraisal. Employees The appraisal system owned by the Human resource department of Buckie cooperative society is to monitor our working progress. Different workers will be required to feed their personal data into the system. The system will transform the data and give a final report on production of workers. The system will make the working environment to be unfriendly due to the monitoring process. The human resource department will use the system to retain or fire employees according to the monitoring report. MD of the Buckie Cooperative Society The staff appraisal system as owned by the Buckie cooperative society. The human resource department is to collect data on workers from the different departments and feed into the system. The system will analyze the data and give data on the best performing department. The system will ensure good performance in the different departments of the company. The world view is that the system will improve on the decision making of managers. Line managers The appraisal system as owned by Buckie cooperative society. The line managers will be necessitated to provide data on the working progress of their employees. The system will analyze the data and give a report on the productive line and the unproductive line. The system will be used to identify the line of productions that will be shut and which to be maintained by senior managers. The world view of the system is that it will ensure profitability of the company by eliminating unproductive lines. Conceptual models of the system Line Managers Employees HR manager MD of the Buckie Cooperative Society Problems that will be encountered Resistance of system by the workforce The company employees will see this system as a way to curtail their freedom. This will make them resist the adoption of the system by either refusing to use it. These employees refusal to use the system will make it useless to the society. This problem will be addressed by educating the staff on the need of this system. They will be needed to be shown the positive part of the implementation of the system. Some of the positive things will be, there will no favoritism in promoting workers because the system will always give correct data. Support of the top management is also important. This will come in place because they are the one who will see into it the system is used. The top leadership is mostly made up of decision makers who will be required to appreciate the help of the system in things like making promotion decision. Lack of necessary Infrastructure for Implementation The system might be developed but cannot be deployed on a timely basis. This can be caused by lack of the necessary infrastructure within the relevant offices. The devices required are computers and networking of the offices. Servers will be required to have the system centrally installed. Computer will be required to allow for personnel who are doing data entry access the system from the server. The system need to be networked to allow for multi users ability. This can be overcome by making purchases of the equipment before deployment. Identification of appraisal criteria It is always hard to come up with a way for appraisal of the different employees due to the different activities they carry out within the organization. Researchers cannot be appraised in the same criteria as managers within the same organization. The manager might be appraised according to increment in profit of the company while the researchers will be appraised according to the number of new products they have come up with. Most businesses do not differentiate the differentiate appraisal criteria for different people in different levels of the organization. The system will solve this by trying to come up with a structured way of solving these disparities. One way the system will be able to have laid down rules within its inference engine which will help it in making decisions. These rules might be collected from different human experts in the field appraisal who will give an unbiased opinion. Once these rules are collected they are normalized to give a uniform way of making a decision which will always be applied wherever an appraisal problem arises. These criteria will be advantageous in that it will be applied for a long period of time by the company without any malicious alteration by managers. Assessment problems The manual assessment has a lot biasness in terms of workers behaviors. This biasness arises where human beings will behave differently while they are being watched for appraisal. These will make the decision makers perceive an employee from a different point view. In our case study the company can decide on days when appraisal of the different employees will be carried. On these particular days the different workers will arrive to work early and try to put the best performance at their different work stations. This will tend to tell the management that the workers are hardworking which might be the opposite of the reality. Introduction of an appraisal system might solve this biasness by a bigger percent. One of the ways the system comes to help is that it will record the reporting and leaving time of the employee each day. Apart from the time it will also record the output of the employee in their different stations of work. These data will be collected over an extensive period of time and will come in hand in making the final decisions. This worker when being appraised the managers will have an easy task because data about their performance have been recorded over a long period of time. Biasness in Decision making The manual system involved fellow workers making decisions even if they are placed at higher management levels. Nepotism can be used in the appraisal process leading to promoting or rewarding the wrong employee. Managers can have vested interest in a certain position or person in the institution. When it comes to decision making they will choose a person who will protect their interest. This person might be having the worst quality compared to other employees but by the fact of knowing the people at the higher rank that does not count. The management appraisal system will be used to eliminate this biasness. These come in place where data processing and entry is done by people who have some right to the system. Any person who alters data into the system can be identified when an audit of the system is carried out. The existence of the auditing trail will deter any worker from entering any incorrect data into the system. The existence of authentication and a control list will also keep away unauthorized people from accessing and make changes to the workers data. Decision making taking a long time The manual system will require the reading through many hands written files to gather information about employees. In Buckie Cooperative society we might be having a thousand junior employees who need to be apprised. These people will each have a file in the registry depicting their education level and performance. Once these files are retrieved analysis has to be carried out to make an informed decision. This analysis stage might take months in regard to the number of people who are carrying it out and number of files being analyzed. Once the analysis is complete some employees might have left the company or their reputation standard might have changed. Changes in the reputation standard might have occurred in situations like an employee has been caught stealing or contributed immensely in discovery of a new product. These changes will not be reflected in the employee’s appraisal leading to making of a wrong decision. The appraisal management system will eliminate this by making sure the appraisal is carried out with the most current information. This is ensured by the system making a decision in a period of one day which will leave minimal data from the employee’s performance in the decision making. Changes required in the company The company will require having some changes in their employee’s knowledge. The system will be computerized and so need to retrain the clerks in using computers. The organization might decide to retain the existing employees and retrain them. It might also take the option of hiring new employees and redeploy the existing to other offices in the organization. The company will also be required to come with an information technology policy. This policy will be required to guide the different employees in using the system. It will also be required to deter workers from misusing the system to suit their own need. The system is seen to affect the employee’s structure in the organization in terms of knowledge which will be a cost to the organization. Reference Stuart Umpleby, 1994. The cybernetics of conceptual systems. Vienna: for Advanced Studies Institute. Read More