Design of an Enterprise-level Business System
             There are a number of information gathering methods that can be used to determine the requirements for an enterprise-level business system. The information needed in order to do an analysis of a business can be obtained using these different methods. One method is a simple survey or questionnaire, but when using this method careful consideration must be taken when developing questions for the survey to get the desired information. You must be extremely careful about how the questions are worded. The wrong wording or a complicated question can return a false result. Cooperation of the people in the corporation is required in order to have the survey completed and even returned. On average about 30 percent of the sent surveys are returned, this is still considered a valid survey, if less than 30 percent is returned the survey will be invalidated. Another method for business information-gathering is interviews with everyone or just with key people such as department heads in a corporation. The one large problem doing this method is time. This is a very time consuming process and cooperation is not always there. Some employees will not tell you everything you need to know, or they can incorporate biases into information. When this happens accurate information is not gathered only opinions or slanted tales. The third is observation, or walking through the actual processing associated with the system. This is information gathered is fact, not opinion. The problem with this method is that performance of the people being observed may be affected by the presence of an onlooker. The fourth method is gathering all of the documentation or operating procedures and just using them to gather the information needed to do an analysis of the system. One problem with this method is that the documentation may not be up to date.
             The best method is probably a blending of all methods into one large method...