Overview of Systems Analysis

This chapter provides an overview of systems analysis. Systems analysis has emerged as a discipline in its own right. A theoretical basis is being developed to give practitioners more insight into the problems they face. The best understanding to date is that systems analysis has five facets which are: (1) analysis of the human activity system, (2) information modeling, (3) socio-technical design, (4) man-machine interface, and (5) technical subsystem. These are related to each other via a two dimensional view of the organization that has one dimension going from the organization to the computer, and one from the people to the technical or functional requirements.