System Development

Question 1 (40 marks)

The government of Ghana have decided to undertake a national project in building an effective and efficient health information system. The ministry of health is tasked to lead the stakeholder team throughout the lifecycle of the project. Other ministries such as the ministry of Finance, education, Environment, Science and technology, communications etc. were also among the stakeholders. This nationwide health information system to be built is to enhance better health service delivery. The information system has the following capabilities:

· Connect the rural, district and regional health data in a distributed network environment with data centric capability.

· Provision of platforms where data can be used to determine and assess the efficient delivery of quality healthcare across private and public health facilities.

· Enhance smooth patient mobility across health services whilst ensuring secure health data exchange.

· Help map diseases across geographical areas with multi-level data analytical capability. This includes the following data sets: demographic data, socio-economic data, environmental data etc

· Provide a platform where edge, fog and cloud computing capabilities can be rollout to support healthcare service at all levels.

· Give capability for disparate devices such as mobile device healthcare applications, smart healthcare devices etc. This is help integrate and support rural healthcare and urban healthcare seamlessly and to enhance integration and interoperability.

· Enhance interoperability between private healthcare systems that are using different vendor hardware and software applications etc.

· Help the health surveillance unit of the public healthcare service to mine real-time data from the information system in order to rapidly respond to outbreak of diseases and track spread etc.

· Support the ministry responsible for planning, population and economic activities to engage models that can use healthcare data for national planning etc.

· Enhance data driven governance for healthcare so that effective national planning and inclusive policy and governance can be carried out efficiently.

· To accommodate future interoperability and integrations with other systems via an enterprise service bus.

· Etc.

 

The system should also capture the following information as part of it

· Employee profile data management

· Hospital Pharmaceutical information

· Patient information database

· Medical laboratory services

· Healthcare resources information

· Teaching Hospitals and health training facility information

· Etc.

 

The governments of Ghana have future plans of creating web services where individual patients undergoing treatment at home can integrate medical equipment to help them have their data integrated. For example, smart watches, pacemakers and other ubiquitous healthcare devices can easily be hooked up to the system to provide a larger pool of data for analytics and effective data driven healthcare services for patients. The government also intend to deploy Artificial intelligence federated healthcare computing to support the healthcare sector etc. The government intend to deploy blockchain technology as well to ensure accurate healthcare data, tracking, avoidance of fake medication and ensuring authentic usage of health equipment across health facilities.

As the Chief Information Systems Officer and the leader of the special team tasked to ensure the feasibility, planning. execution, deployment, maintenance of this nationwide project, solve the following:

(a) Making critical reference to elements in the case study above, explain and justify why you will prefer four (4) out of eight (8) of the below listed models to aid your team in developing the required system. [5 marks each]

1. Waterfall model

2. Rapid Application Development model

3. Component-based development

4. The formal methods model

5. The unified process or Rational Unified Process (RUP)

6. Agile model

7. Spiral model

8. Prototype model

NB: Support your justification with relevant literature with articles indexed in high reputable places such as Scopus. Use journal articles such as Journals in IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library, Association for Information Systems (AIS) eLibrary, IET library, Engineering Index of Elsevier, BCS computer Journals etc. At least 70% of the justifications should come from scientific publications.

 

(b) Effectively applying the methods of capturing and specifying user and system requirements helps in designing good systems that meets goals of the hospital information system, discus four (4) out of the below approaches for eliciting, collecting, and developing requirements and support your discussions with best practices and lessons learned from other implemented works and published documents (Journal, white papers etc.) In your discussion, provide further justifications using suitable software process model(s) for your selected approaches. Relate your discussions and justifications to the elements of the case study given above [5 marks each]

1. Group interviews and one-to-one interviews/ meetings

2. Requirements gathering tools eg Axia’s RFI/RFP

3. Brainstorming and workshops

4. Feasibility study and current system documentation

5. Use case modelling e.g. UML

6. Observation and Questionnaires

7. Prototyping

8. JRD (Joint Requirements Development)

NB: Support your justification with relevant literature with articles indexed in high reputable places such as Scopus. Use journal articles such as Journals in IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library, Association for Information Systems (AIS) eLibrary, IET library, Engineering Index of Elsevier, BCS computer Journals etc. At least 70% of the justifications should come from scientific publications.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Question 2 (20 marks)

COVID-19 has affected the way we do businesses today. Restaurants were heavily affected by partial and full lockdowns. Educational institutions were heavily affected and health institutions were overwhelmed at the early stages. Certain countries at a point have to encourage cashless approaches of doing business whist supply chains were disrupted across the globe. Zoom application and other meeting platform have increased in patronage and have also undergone rapid security adaptability changes to meet certain demands of users.

Most business and institutions that stood the shocks waves of the effect of the virus were the businesses that were built to stand or adapt easily to rapid changes. Adaptation to rapid changes in business processes are essential and we are expecting rapid changes in business environments and these have influenced and affected how information systems are built.

Agility, scalability, interoperability and rapid adaptability are some of the critical needs of systems that rapidly evolve over time. Business processes evolve over time and adaptive project management approaches to systems development have become an integral part of system development teams. Adaptable systems tend to give more competitive advantage to businesses. These systems require rigorous work from system development and business process modelling teams. Present day information processing systems are built to accommodate dynamic modelling techniques in order to make them easily adaptable to business models and respond to changing business requirements. The development of these information systems will require the engagement of dynamic system development methodologies, tools and techniques.

(a) Discuss and analyse how

i. Dynamic System Development methods,

ii. Extreme Programming approaches

are providing some solutions to the development of adaptable business information systems in an ever-evolving business environment with rapid changes to business processes and technology disruptions.

[5 marks for each]

 

(b) Discuss and analyse how the following information systems project management approaches can help project teams in effectively capturing and specifying user and system requirements in such a way that system failures can be avoided.

iii. Adaptive information systems project management

iv. Extreme information systems project management

[5 marks for each]

 

 

 

 

NB: Support your justification with relevant literature with articles indexed in high reputable places such as Scopus. Use journal articles such as Journals in IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library, Association for Information Systems (AIS) eLibrary, IET library, Engineering Index of Elsevier, BCS computer Journals etc. At least 70% of the justifications should come from scientific publications.