Week 11, Muddy: Systems

Systems:

The overall concept of a system makes sense. But I will have to review each video lecture to understand the smaller components. I liked that the lectures were broken down into steps:

1. Planning and Analysis
2. Analysis and Design - I would say this is where things got a little muddy. Including process modeling, object modeling and deliverables.
   
3. Implementation

What made sense the most was the system analyst interview. It was interesting to see this "in the real world" sense.
She basically demonstrated how all of this applies to the business world. How juggling projects, managing people, knowing their needs, meeting deadlines and making it all flow together is feasible and needed as a system analyst. Information systems development is important because it helps businesses run. System analysts can create a tool specifically for the business to function properly or an event, like the SEC event that the interviewed analyst mentioned.

This web site uses a table to clear deliverables up for me: copied below

	Systems Analysis Phase	System Design Phase
Work performed by/ deliverables written by	Systems Analyst	Chief programmer (or Software architect or Lead developer)
Deliverables	System Specification: everything about what the proposed system will do, nothing about how it is to be be built	System Architecture: platform choice, database design, program design, user interface design, etc.
Audiences who read, understand, and accept the deliverables	1. Sponsoring users 2. Chief programmer (or Software Architect or Lead developer	Programmers and technical specialists

This article may go against some of the teachings in this lesson. It's interesting to get different perspectives.

Muddy: Databases

Learning a new program : Access


It's prretty difficult the first go-around for a new program. Especially if you have never worked with databases or anything even like that.
The concepts were pretty easy to understand, but I think this video puts it in plain English.
In the lecture, the program was not put in the simplest language possible.

In business, it's important to fully understand a program. Or at least what you need to do on that program. Software like Photoshop is so vast that most users only use about 1% of it. I am guessing Access is similar. It seems complex, but once you start making reports, forms and relating tables together, I'm sure it get's easier.

About.com has a plethora of tutorials to choose from and walks you step-by-step.
Tutorialized.com has many tutorials that actually refer you back to YouTube videos but does not navigate you away from the page.
Finally, on Functionx.com there is an extensive list on the left side that brings you to a great text and graphic breakdown of table, forms and everything in between.