Suppose the chief executive of the company where you work asks you to find a Webenabled way to get information to and from the salespeople in your company. How would you start? What would you do? Would you just plunge ahead and hope you could come up with a reasonable solution? How would you know whether your solution was a good one for your company? Do you think there might be a systematic way to help you develop a good solution to the CEO’s request? There is. It’s a problem-solving process called the systems approach.

When the systems approach to problem solving is applied to the development of information system solutions to business problems, it is called information systems development or application development. This section will show you how the systems approach can be used to develop e-business systems and applications that meet the business needs of a company and its employees and stakeholders.

Once a new e-business system has been designed, it must be implemented and maintained. The implementation process we will cover in this section follows the investigation, analysis, and design stages of the systems development cycle we discussed in Section I. Implementation is a vital step in the deployment of information technology to support the business information systems developed by a company for employees, customers, and other business stakeholders.