When I started to study the Chapter 3 of CISA Review Manual 2013 (Information Systems Acquisition, Development and Implementation), I thought: «Hmm, I think I’ll never use this information«.
Obviously, I’m affected by some kind of a Cassandra effect, so two days later I was diving deep into the Information Systems Aquisition stuff for a client.
What is Information System Acquisition about?
It’s SDLC (System Development Life Cycle) that guides you through the process of acquisition of a new ERP, for example. CISA Review Manual outlines eight SDLC phases.
- Feasibilyt Study;
- Requirements Definition;
- Software Selecion adn Acquisition;
- Design;
- Development;
- Configuration;
- Implementation;
- Postimplementation.
For my client, by the moment, I went through the first two phases. That means that I made a brief (maybe, too brief) Feasibility Study and started to collect requirements from stakeholders.
The last phase was very interesting, because I had to:
- consult the most affected stakeholders, to understand what they needed;
- detect conflicts between stakeholders of different departments;
- convert stakeholders requirements into system requirements;
- structure requirements in a readable format (more or less…); they must be complete, consistent, unambigous, verifiable, modificable, testable and traceable;
How will the Acquisition Process go? Well, I hope I’ll have some results in the next three weeks. By the moment, I’m focused in elaborationg a vendors short-list. So, stay tuned.
