Management Information Systems: Primis Online System at McGraw Hill

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Analysis
Design
System development
Conclusion
References

Introduction

McGraw Hill founded in the year 1884 has established itself as one of the most reputable company whose headquarters are in New York. They have a long record of professional publications including books and are currently running major offices on several continents around the globe. McGraw Hill as a publisher has been instrumental in transforming published content to make it available online from the advent of the internet a few decades ago. This company has currently an online facility that supports the viewing and downloading of various published books from their e-bookstore. These e-books can be viewed and downloaded at a fee. Further still portions of such book which may include chapters can be downloaded in portable data formats (PDFs).

This has greatly revolutionized the education and academics fraternity since students, lecturers and other academicians are now able to access e-books online and download portable formats of the same at almost half the price.

Currently McGraw Hill publishers are using the Primis online system to utilize this feted process and the site remains active with prospective researchers, buyers, academicians accessing the resources continuously. Primis online now makes almost all McGraw Hill publications available to prospective customers worldwide

What is more is that this feature is available at almost half the price that one would spend on buying the printed edition of the book. It is highly likely that a need to expand their profits and ensure a competitive edge over other publishing companies, McGraw Hill foresaw an opportunity to make use of the internet infrastructure and integrate e-commerce features to achieve this highly innovative published content management system. In order to cut on shipment and production costs McGraw Hill realized the opportunity to use the digital divide to avail their products to their consumers and at an affordable price. Therefore one could be able to purchase a recent edition of any of McGraw Hill published e-books. The client can then pay through the electronic money transfer system and download the e-book as soft copy or better still print it out as hardcopy. The system is flexible because books can be accessed by the same at some stipulated fee. With this facility a student can download different chapters from different books hence ensuring that they study effectively.

This paper focuses on the analysis, design and system development elements applied by the Primis team in deployment of the online system at McGraw Hill.

Analysis

During system development one of the most important questions that a client asks the developer is to study the viability of a certain concept. This concept initially developed on the backdrop of a number of questions. Some of these questions included:

What is the need of the organization currently and in the future? All over organizations exist to make profit, expand and make more profit. McGraw Hill may have asked what value will the use of the Primis online system bring to the company.
Reduced costs as publications are reproduced and published electronically and hence the use of traditional paper and print press technology is not dependable. The cost would cut across reduced labour and raw materials as well as storage and shipment. This is based on the understanding that an e-book is less costly to ship or store as compared to a hard copy. This should also be true for the production cost of such products. Therefore McGraw Hill may have asked about the profitability of implementing and integrating the Primis system. Since McGraw Hill brings together diverse publishing content, the other likely question asked would be how usable or adaptable is the proposed system as far as McGraw Hill products are concerned.
How can the sales representatives at McGraw Hill utilize Primis system to uniquely identify with the organization and hence give them a competitive edge?
How adaptable can the lecturers and students use the e-books available through the Primis online system?
What features are supported by the Primis online system making it suitable for the current and future customers of the organizations products?

Addressing and answering some of these questions gave McGraw Hill and the Primis online system developers a chance to turn the concept into a realistic model that could then work according to their specifications. Book publishing remains a dynamic process and authors normally expand their work by reproducing editions of earlier works. This probably presented itself as the biggest obstacle to the development of the Primis online systems initial success. The more the newer edition manuscripts produced the more difficult it became to update the e-books.

The developers of the system had to separate the system where the application would run independent of the data. This meant that the underlying data could be changed without changing the operations of the front end operations. The organization had to develop and maintain a database as backend while Primis online system would run at the front end. This enabled the book revisions, newer releases and versions of the publications to be made available to the customer based on this arrangement of front and back end processing.

Initially whole books were available within this database. However, this meant that editions with varied sections of the same book required a total rework which was time and resource intensive. If the team developing the Primis online system identified the importance of breaking down the books into chapters, the rework to upload newer editions of the same book would have been much easier and less resource intensive.

This remains a general practice for the development of many systems today where the design and development of a system is carried out based on small sub system units that when finally integrated make up the whole system. This provides the advantage that less effort is spend on maintenance since only a unit of the system can be addressed. It is pertinent to realize that analysis as part of system development life cycle is one of the most crucial stages. It is at this point that the systems requirements are derived and thoroughly defined in order to clearly address the user needs (Hinton, 2005). Therefore having a broader perspective as far as the current needs are concerned helps the user and the system developer to incorporate futuristic components that can keep the system adaptable to the changing environment.

During system development the user normally certifies that the initial requirements collected are sufficient enough to warrant a change of the system. Having investigated the current system and deriving the user requirements, a developer has a go or no go decision made by the sponsors or owners of the proposed system. It is this decision that leads to project initiation and commencement of the development process. At that time McGraw Hill publishers had a need and information gathered at that particular time may have been inadequate but was sufficient enough to warrant the development of the Primis online system. As such if I were the one in charge of the project at that time and armed with the information that was then, I would proceed with the implementation of the system. It was likely that the system would be able to address the needs of the organization at that particular time. However a change in technology would be tremendous adaptive requirements to the system.

Design

Mc Graw Hill is a business organization and therefore top among its list of requirements for the implementation of the Primis system was the competitive advantage for quality and service. This was most likely the driving force behind the development of the Primis online system. McGraw Hill needed an innovation that would integrate in their processing and enable their books to be accessed and purchased over the internet. This in itself was leading to improved services, speed and quality. In order to effectively compete with other publishing companies, McGraw Hill needed to start this innovative service using the Primis online system.

Process engineering is a system design process that enables the system analyst to closely work with the system user to identify the current business processes and model the proposed system (Boddy, Boonstra, & Kennedy, 2004). There are a number of system design tools that we used within this project at McGraw Hill to illustrate the functional requirements and the technical specification. During system design the developer has various available tools to assist their model at every aspect of the current and proposed system. Typical of the functional requirements is the data flow diagrams which are used to describe the entities and processes of a system. Similarly use cases are another tool mostly used to model functional requirements during the object oriented systems design. The Primis team may have used the deployment diagrams to draw up the technical specification of the system. These diagrams are hardware and software specific. Nodes in this case represent a host and can be a device like a computer connected by communication channels. These nodes would consist of artifacts which represent files and documents present on these nodes.

In order to ensure that the implemented Primis online system is a solution to McGraw Hills customers, an analysis had to be carried out and the user requirements that were derived from this exercise were used to establish the objective that guided the design of the Primis system so that it worked as a business solution for the problem the organization was facing then.

During the design of an information system, the developers will always work to have a system that is highly cohesive yet loosely coupled. While this is the case the system can easily be decomposed and the small units managed or maintained before being reassembled into the big system. Because technology keeps changing system developers will always design systems that are easily decomposed so that any of the system component that requires adaptive maintenance can be worked on without affecting other sub components of the system (Valverde, Toleman, & Cater-steel, 2010). Therefore it is likely that the team that developed the Primis online system for McGraw Hill publishers dealt with the inevitable change and uncertainty of the future in this manner. The system was designed in such a way as to allow components of it to be removed, modified and returned depending on the changing needs.

System development

Prototyping is a technique which involves the developer of the system coming up with a model of the proposed system at the onset in order to draw out user reaction and gather user requirements. Generally the prototyping as a technique would consist of a number of general steps. The establishment of the prototype objectives is a very crucial stage in the whole process. It is actually the prototyping plan that leads to an executable model (Sommerville, 2001).

Prototyping has a number of benefits some of which include the following:

Incomplete or inconsistent requirements can be identified as the prototype is developed during the iterations
Any missing user services can be detected.
Any misunderstandings between the users and the developers can be identified as the system functionality is demonstrable
Difficult to use or confusing user services may be identified and refined

Prototyping as a system development approach remains one of the most effective ways of rapid application development. This approach would have been applicable during the development of the Primis online system to help the Primis team and the proposed system user to model the requirements. The use of a model or prototype is what makes prototyping a very effective system development approach. During prototyping the end user of the modeled system will get a chance to work with the model and provide any feedback which then can be incorporated depending on whether the prototype is evolutionary or not. Among the change management techniques used to increase the chances of the Primis system success included:

Organizational planning
Motivation
Instilling belief in the proposed system
Exercising honesty.

It was necessary and important to consider the relationship of Primis to the back end systems at McGraw Hill in order to design a suitable and adaptable human computer interface. Considering that I was a project manager within this project, I would have adopted the technologies that allow the user to change their interaction environment.

Giving the user leeway increases usability especially for the advanced users. In this way the system would be adaptable to the different category of users at their respective levels of expertise whether they are students, teachers or researchers.

Illustrations form an important part of any study package and therefore the more representative they are in terms of color and design the better is their effect. Custom textbooks are more illustrative if they have color and therefore as a professor I would prefer a color e-book over the black and white print.

The Primis online system requires a very versatile content management system that can allow content to be added and edited as soon as it is available. It is likely that the database at McGraw Hill remains highly dynamic with additions made to the content therein depending on the launching of newer editions of books and other publications. This database is likely to be increasing in size as these additions are made to it.

Conclusion

The analysis, design and development of the Primis online system at McGraw Hill was one of the most innovative endeavors within the global information and educational content management. The success story is reflected in how the analysis, design, system development and maintenance of the system were carried on.

References

Boddy, D., Boonstra, A., & Kennedy, G. (2004).Management Information systems. Essex: Prentice Hall.

Hinton, M. (2005). Introducing Information Management: the business approach. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Sommerville, I. (2001). Software Engineering (6th ed.). London: Pearson Education.

Valverde, R., Toleman, M., & Cater-steel, A. (2010). A method for comparing traditional and component based models in information system re-engineering. Information systems and e-business management, 9(1), 89-107.

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