Chapter 4 – Information Systems to Enhance Business
2.1 What Is a Business Process?
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Identify a business process
- Describe the difference between an As-Is and To-Be business process
- Ask questions to elicit business process information from the client
Introduction
Every information system is designed to improve business in some way. However, before making an improvement, it is critical to understand the current business process. In this chapter we will develop a technique to diagram business processes. We will first diagram the current business process—the so-called As-Is process. After studying the process, we will be in a position to propose and diagram a future process—the so-called To-Be process. If we have done our job well, the To-Be process will improve upon the As-Is process, making it more efficient, effective, user friendly, and so forth. In other words, every process improvement should move the business closer to achieving its goals.
Where Are We in the Life Cycle?
Many information systems projects are conceived of in a life cycle that progresses in stages from analysis to implementation. The diagram below shows the stages that we touch in the current chapter:
Licensing Information
This text was adapted by Saylor Academy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensor.
