Business Case for Technology Investments

Abstract

The following paper is written to provide insight on the benefits of using a business case when determining whether to implement technology within a business. The paper will be going over four points: determining which process of prototyping to take. How to create a testing plan: that includes the standards and procedures. Ways in which to access technology, such as wireless access or internal access. Finally, the components that would be need to integrate into the existing system to allow the program to run.

Business Case for Technology Investments

Using a business case is a smart choice when implementing technology investments. A business case is a written descriptive document, which has information on Information System (IS) team's plan, how they are going to accomplish changes (such as software upgrades) and how the changes will best suite a company or business (Rainer & Cegielski, 2009). A business case for technology usually describes an upgrade or major change to a computer or IS infrastructure to suit the needs of the business and their processes. It is important that the business case when written focuses on the needs and the desires of a business in terms of technology and what the technology can do for an enterprise. A successful business case is vital information that usually based on facts, faith or fear (Valacich, 2012). That means an IS team will need to fully understand the processes and goals of a business and present a business case that will fully convince top managers of the key important factors driving the business. Also the team needs to avoid fictitious information (Valacich, 2012). Investing the technology to help a company achieve its goals importance is crucial for success. Poor decisions in a business case could cost a business tons of money. The goals could focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Resource management (CRM), for example. We will examine a business case for technology that involves prototyping software and the prospective business environments. Stringent analyzation of a detailed testing plan broken down in stages with procedures and standards is a must. Exploring sources of accessibility or ways that personnel can access this technology is also a crucial aspect within development. Finally there needs to be a comprehensive implementation plan for such a technological project. First let us look at prototyping and the environment process.

Prototyping: Environments and Processes

Prototyping is a very popular tool in a project development plan. A project development plan consists of the system (or software) development lifecycle or System Developmental Life-Cycle (SDLC). There are many types of SDLC methods such as waterfall, v-model, spiral, agile, rapid application development (RAD) and rational unified process (RUP) to name a few (Rainer & Cegielski, 2009). There are tools for the main SDLC that enhance the SDLC method, such as prototyping and joint application development (JAD). One of the most important tools is prototyping. Various descriptions of prototyping are written, such as prototyping is an alternative to the SDLC method vice an enhancement tool (Valacich, 2012). Nevertheless, prototyping allows user participation, promotes a close working relationship between developer and users and helps the feasibility of the design (Rainer & Cegielski, 2009). Prototyping in a nutshell: "defines an initial list of user requirements, builds a model of the system, and then improves the system in several iterations based on users' feedback" (Rainer & Cegielski, 2009, p. 408). Prototyping defies the traditional waterfall method that usually has "unchangeable" specifications. A handful of users from top executives to regular employees must involve themselves for successful outcome of the prototyping process. Prototyping is an iterative or looping process of either contains the elements that are an interest to the user or a small-scale working model of the entire system. After each loop, minor changes occur and users must be present for a meeting with the developers for positive and negative feedback. The designers will once again try to make the next loop a more positive one. Next let us look at the prototyping environments that suits businesses best.

There are many environments that suit well to the prototyping process. The speed of the iterative process is an advantage for those business environments that require a quick upgrade for CRM, such as the Ohio blue cross blue shield where the system software upgrade only took 90 days (Nickels, 2012). Another similar example, which used only five personnel in 89 only days at a cost of $250,000, is Monarch Financial Services, Inc. (Nickels, 2012). The speed to which customer data is crucial to get back online in a hurry is the key for a CRM type business as seen in the previous two examples. Next we will look at the testing process in the prototype model.

Testing: Procedures and Standards

This area of the paper discuss testing and the steps of structuring it thru the process of project. The goal of integration testing is to ensure that all interacting subsystems in a system interface correctly with one another to produce the desired results ("Toolbox", 1998-2013). Furthermore, in trying to attain this goal, integration tests will ensure that the introduction of one or more subsystems into the system does not have an adverse effect on existing functionality. An integration test covers the testing of interface points between subsystems ("Toolbox", 1998-2013). Integration testing is performed once unit testing has been completed for all units contained in the subsystems being tested. Integration Testing Procedures consist of:

* Creating and integration test plan

* Creating test data

* Conducting tests according to the integration test plan

* Reporting and reviewing the results of the test

During this phase, the interaction between subsystems is tested, which includes interfaces through Inter Process Communications (IPC) and files ("Toolbox", 1998-2013). This phase is performed by an independent test team. This team prepares and executes integration tests, generates problem reports and is responsible for passing the integrated system on to the System Test Team for system testing ("Toolbox", 1998-2013). The Integration Test team then enters a support mode in which it will test problem reports generated by the System