problems like that of staff morale which do not/cannot form part of the formal analysis process. The analyst here will need to draw on experience and judgement values of the managers themselves as managers select the strategy to pursue and play a large role in systems development, which can conflict with employees’ needs.
Management will want a system that will improve the efficiency of their business. They will look for systems that will increase the speed their employees are able to output a given product or service. A slow system will affect staff morale because the employee is unable to meet the productivity quota set by the management team.
A study conducted by OASIG Survey, a DTI support special interest group concerned with the organisational aspects of information technology, used interviews on a sample of consultants and system developers. They discovered that many organisations are not successful at utilising non-technical i.e. human and organisational aspects in information technology, and often failed to site how work could be organised to make the information system more effective.
Amongst their findings was the continuing practice of adopting structured system tools resulting in end-users not being considered in the development, and thus the implementation and design of new technology systems. When interviewed, the majority of end-users complained that although the analysts and developers would approach them for input regarding the current system, the design was left for management and the implemented system failed to meet their needs or expectations.
Analysts and developers, when looking at a current system, will ask why it is not working. They need to look at the communication and information flows between management: if the user understands why they are doing something, if there is a lack of information due to training or limitation of information flowing between systems.
The analyst and developer will see how this could be incorporated into the current system. They will want to look at what errors are occurring in the system and how these can be prevented. If there is a lack of control in an organisations analyst, they need to know whether it is the people within the organisation who are the problem, or whether it is the system itself. They need to actively correlate technical hard properties and behavioural soft properties.
The Human Relations Approach maintains that performance or users within the organisation may be connected to the tasks involved. They may want greater autonomy and there may be a lack of variety in the current system that does not afford them this degree of responsibility. Analysts and developers will also need to ask if the system can be simplified, if users performance is directly related to the complexity of the system, and if the problem itself could be broken down into a simple set of interrelated tasks that are accessible to all within the organisation.
There are always conflicts of interest within an organisation. Analysts and developers need to be aware that where a common ground regarding changes to be made within the organisation cannot be reached, it is likely to infringe upon the validation of research into it. If individuals within the organisation have no common goal or objective, then finding a solution to a problem is very difficult.
Human behaviour is unpredictable. Their problems are complex ones. Simple problems yield simple solutions because there is a clear cut objective, which is not influenced by well-defined behaviour. There is also an existence of subsystems where there is a general consensus of goals. This brings us to the topic of Total Quality Management Theory (TQM).