Background of the Problem
In early 2015, following the dissolution of my grandfather’s privately-held insurance company, my parents formed a successor company to acquire its clients, staff, and operations. Like its predecessor, my parents’ company specializes in risk management and insurance coverage services in the automotive industry. This work has extensive documentation requirements that involve filling out a lot of forms. Different forms may vary according to state, such as the uninsured/underinsured motorists form. The company website hosts hundreds of forms and in-house applications for its clients to download.
Solving the Problem Using the Information Systems Development Life Cycle
Systems Investigation
Under the current system, the process of finding forms and then filling them out and submitting them is very inefficient. To access a form, visitors to the company website have to go to the “Applications” page, which displays a list of links to applications organized alphabetically by form title. They then have to navigate to the part of the page where the link is located and click on it. To fill out and submit a form, clients have to download the unfillable .pdf document from the link, print it and fill it out by hand, scan the filled-in form, and email or fax the form back to the company. Then to use the information in the form, an employee has to manually enter each handwritten form entry into a spreadsheet. If a client needs to combine forms or partial sections of forms into a single document, that also has to be done by hand. These are tedious tasks that can take a lot of time to complete on both the company’s end and on the customer’s end.
Systems Analysis
It would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if part of the process of filling out, parsing, concatenating, combining, and submitting forms can be computerized, and if the process of selecting forms can be made easier. This scenario is ripe for a solution using an iterative design approach. We can view the pattern of the problem as corresponding to the process of design (Alexander & Maiden, 2005).
Systems Design
It will allow clients to search for forms by category using a dropdown menu, whereas now they have to scour the page for the correct link.
It will eliminate the need to print out forms, fill them out by hand, and scan them, by providing a tool or a link to a tool that enables pdf filling and signing online.
It will enable uploading of filled forms, with an option to upload multiple forms at once, as well as a menu option to combine forms or pages from a form into a single document. This step can include filename validation, so forms with filenames that do not follow an approved format will be rejected, enhancing the company’s recordkeeping and creating new database management efficiencies.
It will facilitate form submission by making it possible to do through the website using the web application, whereas it is currently only possible to submit forms by fax or email.
Hidden from end users, the application will include a program to capture data from a user’s form input in an array list of string elements, saving the list as a data file generated automatically upon submission of a form. (Such an unordered, unlabeled list could be useful for at least two reasons I can think of. If a form has to be renewed annually, and the client information has not changed from the last year, the data file from the previous year can be used to confirm that the new year’s information is correct. It would be simple to write a program that compares the strings stored at the same index value in each list and checks them for equivalence, looping through the list by increasing the index value until the last item in the lists has been reached; if the lists are not equivalent, the program can return a “false” flag and the index or indices where the discrepancy occurs. The list could also be useful for its metadata; for example, a program can be written to compare the length of two lists generated by different submissions of the same form. If one list has 29 entries but the other has 30, then a client has most likely committed an omission error.) This will automate part of the data entry process and make it more accurate by eliminating transcription errors and inefficiencies caused by sloppy handwriting.
Systems Implementation
The proposed system is modularized, meaning that each feature can be translated into code, troubleshot, used independently of the others. This will make system implementation easier, since each tool can be developed and layered on to the application. Different developers can work simultaneously on different tools, since the tools do not interact with each other. An application development platform that is compatible with existing infrastructure may be used to create the product, which should fit seamlessly into the user experience. There are several open-source platforms specifically for workflow optimization that may be appropriate for this project.
Systems Maintenance
The system should implement a user feedback component that will allow users to leave their input, report issues, and ask questions. These messages can be routed to the website administrator’s inbox, along with alerts about catastrophic meltdowns that occur on the client’s computer due to using the product.
Feasibility Study
Operational Feasibility
Technical Feasibility
There is a plethora of open-source development suites, video tutorials, programming guides, books, and other readily available resources that can inform the development process.
Political Feasibility
The finished product may use or modify code that has already been written by other software developers for the same purpose. Thus, permission should be sought from and credit must be given to the original authors of any outside code. Compliance with copyright law is a requirement for this project.
Tangible and Intangible Benefits
References
Alexander, I. F., & Maiden, N. (Eds.). (2005). Scenarios, stories, use cases: through the systems development life-cycle. John Wiley & Sons.
Hirschheim, R., Klein, H. K., & Lyytinen, K. (1995). Information systems development and data modeling: conceptual and philosophical foundations. Cambridge University Press.
