Introduction
The paper is intended to apply and synthesize the concept of management information system to the case of Primus Idea of McGraw Hills for text book publication while considering its future implementation. The management information system is considered as critical for the decision making within the business.
The management information system must be protected and secured to complete the system development project successfully. For this purpose, each step of the development must be well managed and secured. The steps of development of information system include system analysis, system design, system implementation and system maintenance. The purpose of the paper is to answer the questions of the case study at each of these steps of information system development.
McGraw Hills brought the idea of Primus that was meant to develop custom publish text books so that the users especially professors and students could adapt to their specific need of course. The purpose behind the idea was to change the content of the text books and the output product of the publishing process (McGraw-Hill MIS Video Case: Primus). The paper is going to analyze the case of Primus information system by McGraw Hills to apply the concepts and steps of information system development include analysis, design, development, and maintenance.
Analysis
Determining the feasibility of the project and the system going to develop is crucial that is usually conducted at the stage of analysis of the regime in the system development life cycle. A feasibility study is usually considered as the rough analysis of the system’s viability that helps to refine the system on a continuous basis. For the feasibility study, one can ask multiple questions within different categories of feasibility include operational feasibility, political/legal feasibility, technical feasibility, economic viability and human factor feasibility (AO’Brien et al. 2006). Keeping these categories in mind, the McGraw Hill could ask various questions to determine the feasibility of Primus Project.
McGraw could have requested that how the system of Primus would be marketed to the users and clients such as professors, students, and other faculty members, etc. McGraw Hill can also conduct the cost benefit analysis to determine the tangible and intangible benefits of the system. Behind a single project, the needs are diversified as there are many stakeholders associated with a single project such as the users, developers, organization, management, specialists and many other groups. Therefore, McGraw Hill could ask about the needs of the groups of stakeholders.
The needs of IT specialists are obviously interrelated to the technical uses and benefits. Therefore, for the technical feasibility, McGraw Hill could ask about the technical compatibility and reliability and easy availability of the technology, software, and hardware. Other than the IT specialists, the needs of the organization are completely different such as McGraw could determine the needs of an organization such as process improvement, cost reduction, achievement of competitive advantage, etc.
The feasibility study could enable McGraw Hill to see the project in the context of what the organization is needed to achieve. The main focus of any organization is to meet the needs and requirement of the customers and end users. The publishing organization is required to meet the need of students with their published text books. The organization with the help of Primus system could easily meet the customers’ need and demand.
Other than these questions, McGraw Hill could also ask other questions to study the feasibility of the Primus Project such as how would it be difficult to drive custom publishing for the representatives of sales and what percentage of the customers (students and professors) are interested in adopting the text books of custom publishing and what strategies and accommodations could be used to attract the interest of a vast number of the students.
Likelihood of Implementation of System
Primus is the system that the organization is intended to incorporate and implement. There are several areas that could be taken into account while considering the implementation of the Primus System in the organization. The information is imperative to achieve the competitive advantage. The information has changed the process of doing business (Porter & Millar, 1985) and therefore, the available information is paramount to the text book publishing process and problems to increase the likelihood of the new system implementation.
However, the team had the information at that time was not enough to implement the system of Primus easily. The team did not know about the actual demand for the custom textbooks for suppose, would the customers really interested in such books or would the custom books would be able to meet the needs of the customers and end users (McGraw-Hill MIS Video Case: Primus).
Hence, it can be said that the available information to the team possess the medium possibility of the system implementation as much of the information was still needed to increase its likelihood.
System Design
Competitive Advantages driving the development of Primus System of McGraw Hill
Process engineering is the field of engineering that deals with the processes in the businesses and industries for the product development, production and others as well. The aim of process engineering is remained towards the improvement of the business processes to achieve the competitive advantage in the quality, cost, service, and speed.
Therefore, with the system development of custom publishing, it is important to analyze that what advantages drove the team towards the elaboration of this system. With assessing the McGraw MIS video Case: Primus, it appears that the system was driven to achieve the competitive advantage in quality, service, and speed.
The team of system development of Primus was needed to make sure that the new custom textbook products would provide the way out to the customers for their issues and problem with the existing publishing process and textbooks.
The available information helped the team to find out the problems to the customers such as the existing books were unable to meet the needs of the professors and the faculties in the universities. Therefore, the improvement in the quality of the product is the first competitive advantage that led the company towards the alternative system “Primus System”.
Other than the quality advantage, the system was also aimed to improve the service standard of the textbook publishing industry. Therefore, the service improvement is another competitive edge that helped the team to think of the Primus System. With the development of the system, the cost was another benefit that was considered to achieve with the Primus System. Primus System was considered to provide “Just in Time” production (McGraw-Hill MIS Video Case: Primus) that would automatically reduce the inventory. Inventory is one of the major elements that increase the cost of the business; therefore, managing the inventory would automatically improve the cost of the textbook publishing process. The improvement in the quality also results in the reduction in cost (Gregg, 2006). Hence, the cost, service and quality were the major advantages to drive the Primus System Development.
Objective of Primus System Design to make the customers perceived the product as solution
The major purpose of the development of the Primus System was to solve the existing problems in the system to the customers and end users. It was mentioned in the “McGraw MIS video Case: Primus” that the alternative system was aimed to resolve the problems faced by the professors with the content in the textbooks. It is vital for the system development team to have information about the interest and needs of the customers as meeting the customers’ needs must be the major objective of the system development (Bender RBT, 2003).
Although technical developments are the most important factors in the system development, however, for the successful completion of the life cycle of the system development, it is also significant to properly manage the system. The team of Primus System remained focused towards both objectives i.e. to achieve the objective of providing the solution to the customers as well as developing the technically valid strategy while designing system.
As it is very important that the system must be perceived by the customers as the solution to their problems, therefore, the company kept this objective in mind while designing Primus system such as the course must satisfy the professors so that its demand would increase with time.
System Development
Prototyping for Primus System Development
At the stage of development, prototyping is very necessary to lead the development towards the accurate system. As the Primus System was actually aimed to meet the needs of the customers within the education business industry, therefore, prototyping would definitely help the Primus system development team. The prototype products would help the team to refine the system as the users or customers would continuously involve in the development process.
The involvement of users is very significant when the system is actually preferred to have interaction with the end-users. The interaction with the end users was needed while developing Primus System because the Primus was actually meant to solve the issues and problems of the users. Therefore, prototyping would have helped the team of Primus to understand that either the prototype is functionally perfect to the customers, or it needs to improve.
Importance of relationship of backend systems with Primus
The backend systems are those systems within the corporations that are directly involved in running the organization or the company. These systems include the system to deal with orders, the system to manage inventory and the system to support the process of the supply chain, etc.
Therefore, it was very important for Primus team to interrelate the system with the backend systems so that the system would definitely help to achieve the benefits for the organizations and the companies. Providing back ends to support the database of Primus was very significant to improve the process of the business of publishing textbooks.
Project Manager of Primus
As the benefits of prototyping have already discussed above, therefore, I would intend to communicate with the end-users (Professors and students) as well as the project team and other stakeholders such as organizations so that the system design would be developed as perfectly functioning. The competitive advantages lead the business world to develop the information systems, however, for these front end systems, it is crucial to integrate them with the back end systems.
Much of the data of the companies and businesses within the education industry were stored in the back end systems, therefore, to restore that data, the relationship of back end systems with Primus was significant. Hence, the recovery of the previous data was actually the major purpose behind the importance of the relationship of back end systems and Primus system.
Maintenance
Criteria to determine what gets added in the content in Primus Database
One of the biggest concerns about the database is the management of data. Therefore, for the future implementation of Primus, it would be important to decide the criteria for determining that how the data would be managed and what gets added in the content of the database of Primus. Usually, the organizations made efforts and struggled to manage the significant data due to the continuous increase in the data. With the growth in the data in Primus database, I would use the virtualization to change the growing data into smaller data. Virtualization is one of the best techniques to deal with challenges of data management (Savitz, 2012).
With the help of reducing the data, it can easily be determined that what is added in the content since the administration of data would become centralized with the virtualization and the outcomes of the data analysis would be more precise and accurate. Other than the management of data, virtualization would also help the team to provide benefits to the end users. Some of these advantages include freedom, flexibility, and low cost.
Effects of printed textbooks revision on the content in Primus database
Changes to the data can influence the databases. The changes and revisions are common in the textbooks and courses of universities every year to support the variations in the curriculum. The changes in the textbooks are very important as it helps to improve the teaching to the students.
Therefore, the changes and revisions in the textbooks could affect the content in the Primus database. For this purpose, the system would be needed to remain effective and frequently update to remain aligned with the changes in the printed text books.
In addition to this, the e-book system of Primus would also be affected by the change in the printed books as the e-book is definitely a copy of the printed books and the revision in the printed books would result in affecting the e-books. However, there is one benefit for the e-books i.e. it can be changed at any time, while the printed books can only be changed once a year (Rubin, 2012).
Conclusion
With the development and implementation of the Primus system, there are many areas of information system life cycle that could be taken into consideration such as system analysis, system design, system development and system maintenance.
Taking all these areas into account while assessing the implementation of Primus system, it is found that the first step in the system development must be feasibility study in which the needs of the customers and other stakeholders are identified along with collecting information from different sources to answer that either it would be feasible to develop and implement such system along with meeting the needs of the users.
Primus was the beginning of the life of the system of producing custom textbooks; therefore, it would be taken and managed differently with more effective and efficient techniques such as prototyping, communication, and change management, etc. At the system design stage, it is assessed that the project team must focus on the objective of making the product to be perceived as the solution to the problem of the customers.
Hence, it is concluded from the analysis of the “McGraw-Hill MIS Video Case: Primus” that some improvements could be made in the process of system development life cycle to implement the Primus System successfully within the education industry.
References
AO'Brien, J., Marakas, G. M., Hills, T. M. G., & Lalit, M. R. (2006). Management information systems.
Bender RBT. (2003). Systems Development Life Cycle: Objectives and Requirements. Retrieved July 13, 2016, from http://www.benderrbt.com/Bender-SDLC.pdf
Gregg, D. (2006). Reducing Procurement Costs While Improving Quality. Retrieved July 4, 2016, from http://www.ormed.com/datasheets/Ormed-S-C_E-P_White-Paper.pdf
McGraw-Hill MIS Video Case: Primus
Porter, M. E., & Millar, V. E. (1985). How information gives you competitive advantage. Harvard Business Review.
Rubin, E. (2012). Legal education in the digital age. Cambridge University Press.
Savitz. E. (2012). Best Practices For Managing Big Data. Retrieved July 13, 2016, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/07/05/best-practices-for-managing-big-data/#23bd0e97ef02
