Proposed Information System Design And Deployment Essay For UCC.

John decides to engage you as a consultant. Your job is to provide him with solutions that address the following issues and provides advice on what needs to beimplemented in the future.

Problems with The Current System

1. Staff always must be available to answer phone calls and emails from parents to note their details for tax invoices
2. Parents cannot get a proper end of the yearstatement
3. Wastage of supplies due to inaccurate stock levels

UCC or UNICEF Child Care is a child care provide in Australia. It is run by a group of people. The chairman of UCC is Mr. John Smith. The organization has grown significantly in the past few years. It started as a small child care service provider with its first center in Sydney. However, the organization gained huge popularity and soon it has expanded over other cities, including Brisbane, Melbourne, and Rockhampton. Currently, it servers around 2500 people per day through all of its centers. The number of employees have also increased. The accountant and administrative staffs at the Sydney center mainly communicate with other centers and the main business process is centralized and managed from the Sydney center. The chairman has hired an independent consultant to help UCC in automating its business process and to solve the problems it is facing. The proposed information system will help to streamline its key business processes and will reduce the manual workload. Hence, the productivity of the staffs will be channelized to other business processes and it will be improved.

The primary objective of the project is to propose a system design and deployment plan to UCC. It will help the organization to streamline and automate its current business processes so that it can reduce the manual workload, and manage the business efficiently. In the previous report, the key aspects of system requirement investigation and project planning have been completed.

The system will be developed using iterative SDLC approach. It will require participation of the key stakeholders at the different iterations and that will help to develop the system from scratch and to fulfill the requirements effectively.

The report is focused on the system design and interface design tasks. In the following sections of the report there will be designs and models for the proposed information system for the UCC. It will cover designs like use case diagram and description of the use cases, context diagram, level 0 DFD, ER diagram, descriptions of the data elements, CRUD table, and prototype of the interfaces for the proposed information system.

The use case diagram for the proposed information system for UCC covers the critical use case. The main components of a Use Case diagram, are the actors, use cases and associations between actors and use cases. Actors are the different types of users, group of users, external systems, and other organizations that interacts with the proposed information system. Actors interact with the system to attain some defined goal. The functional requirements of the proposed information system will be represented by a set of use cases. The use cases are kept within a system boundary. Use case is used to model the behavioral aspects of the proposed system. So, the system is represented as a black box. Only the interactions between the system and the users are analyzed from this diagram. It also helps to understand the triggering events behind various use cases, main flow of actions, alternative and exceptional flow of actions (Wang & Wang, 2012).

Objective and Methodology

The use case description for the critical use case ‘Deposit Money’ is given below. The use case particularly represents the online payment and automated receipt generation case.

Context level diagram is a high level diagram where the system is also represented as a black box and a single process. It shows how the system is related to other external entities like the users, other systems, organizations, external data sources etc. It shows how data flows between the system and the external entities. Context diagram is an important tools used in system analysis phase. However, it does not provide any information on sequencing, timing, and process synchronization. For example, there is no information about which processes run in parallel from a context diagram. Some advantages of using context diagram are (Dennis, et al., 2014),

• It helps to understand the system boundaries and the scope of the proposed information system. The design is more intuitive compared to the other diagrams and models used during the system analysis phase.
• It does not require any technical knowledge to prepare or understand a context diagram.
• Context diagram can be further extended into high level data flow diagrams like DFD level 0 diagram, DFD level 1 diagram and so on.

The context diagram for the proposed information system for the UCC is,

The Level 0 DFD diagram based on the context diagram is,

The entity relationship diagram containing the details about the entity sets and relationship sets is given below.

The CRUD diagram is given below. CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete.

The data elements for the proposed information system are given below.

1. Parent

2. Staff

3. Child

4. ServiceRequest

5. Center

6. SupplyRequest

7. Service

8. Payment

9. Card

10. Cheque

11. Deposit

The proposed online information system for the UCC will be a web based system. All stakeholders can access the website for different sets of functionalities. The system will have facilities like online payment, user accounts, user registration, details about the organization, their services, and contact details.

The website will be deployed on a three tier client server architecture. The client side platform will be developed on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It will be the front end of the website having web pages like Home, About, My Account, Contact, Online Payment, and Services. On the other hand, the server side will be developed on PHP. It will be connected to the database and application servers. The architecture is illustrated below.

Currently, the prototype version of the front end part of the website has been included in the report. It has the web pages and other controls, like the forms, buttons, and links to show the look and feel of the website. The sitemap of the proposed website is given below.

The primary objectives of the website prototyping are to give a realistic view of the proposed website, helping users to provide feedbacks faster, identifying the changes required on the front end part, developing a clear layout for the proposed website so that the system development phase takes lesser time, and to collect more information about any missing functionality or workflow.

Visual designs or the aesthetic part of the front end is necessary. To give a good first impression on the visitors, the website must be aesthetically designed. The text and controls must be clear and easily readable. The use of colors, fonts, images must be coherent and must match with the business objectives.

This the main focus of the website. Only good visual designs are not sufficient to make a website useful. The design must be focused on the user experience of the targeted group of users. The designs must follow the usability standards followed in the industry and must provide high degree of user satisfaction to deliver better user experience. Some important requirements are (Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2015),

• The website must have clearly visible and easily accessible search and help facilities.
• The navigation system of the website must be well-designed. Users must be able to navigate through the website without any trouble.
• The sizes of the fonts, and the choice of the fonts must be easily readable by the users.
• The design must be responsive so that users can seamlessly view and use the website from mobile devices and from the web.

The prototypes of the user interfaces are given below.

1. Home Page

2. About Page

3. My Account Page

4. Service Page

5. Contact Page

6. Payment Gateway Page

Conclusion 

The report contains system analysis and design information for the proposed information system for UCC. The system designs includes use case diagram, use case description, ER diagram, context diagram and DFD level 0 diagram. All these will help to understand the system from different perspectives. Other than that, CRUD table and data element tables have been added. Following the same, there are detailed prototyping for the interface designs.

References

Dennis, A., Wixom, B. H. & Roth, R. M., 2014. Systems Analysis and Design. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons.

Shelly, G. B. & Rosenblatt, H. J., 2015. System Analysis and Design. Boston: Cengage Learning.

Wang, S. & Wang, H., 2012. Information Systems Analysis and Design. s.l.:Universal-Publishers.