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Pitfalls In Analyzing Systems In Organizations, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Despite the availability of elaborate methods for defining data and business processes, huge amounts of time and effort are wasted on system projects that produce disappointing results. An important contributing factor is the difficulty business and IT professionals experience when they try to describe, evaluate, and/or analyze systems in organizations even at a cursory level. Between 1997 and 2003, the author's information system courses for evening MBAs and EMBAs required students to write two group papers that present a business-oriented analysis of a real world system in an organization and propose preliminary recommendations for improvements. If these working students are …