What is the Requirement of the Information?

The Information acts as a very critical tool in making the strategies for an organization by the management of that organization. Information is almost everything for the planning that is to be done for the smooth functioning of the organization. The requirement of the Information can be defined as the statement of the Information that is very detailed in the nature and is usually about the Information needs that a new system has to fulfill. In the Information requirement, it is very important to identify who needs which information and also when, where, when and how it is required. With the conduction of the analysis of the Information requirement, one comes to know about the objectives of the system and after this the detailed description of the functions that the new system is expected to perform can be developed.

The Information is the resource and becomes imperative to analyze and also access the Information requirements of an organization, according to which the suitable information can be provided to the management for doing the planning for the normal and the result oriented running of an organization. With the help of the analysation, one can easily come to know about the needs and the type of the Information that is required.

So it is very difficult and at the same time very much important that the Information needs that are recognized are upto the mark and act suitably at the right time for the management for carrying on further with the process of the planning and then the decision making. In this step, there is generally a large possibility of the results going wrong and hence many system’s analysts refer this step to be very much critical and also at the same time they refer it to be very risky. According to the systems analyst, the major reasons because of whom it becomes very much difficult to get a correct and the complete set of the Information requirements can be summarized as the follows –

1. Humans are largely affected as the Information processors and the problem solvers by the various types of the constraints.
2. The variety of the various types of the Information needs.
3. The complex nature of the various types of the Information needs.
4. The complexity of the different types of the interactions that take place among all the users and the analyst.
5. Sometimes, the users are not ready or do not want to provide the Information about the various requirements.

The requirements of the Information can include the following factors –
1. Economic constraints
2. Technical constraints
3. Time constraints
4. Goals
5. Objectives
6. Procedures
7. Decision processes

The establishment of the various Information requirements can be done at the various levels and this is mainly done for the purpose of the development of the organizational Information system and these levels can be summarized as the follows –

1. Organizational Information Requirements.
2. The database requirements that have been defined by the various data models and various other specifications.
3. The detailed Information requirements for an application.

There is a dire need of understanding these levels in the detail and complete detail about these levels follows –
1. Organizational Level Information Requirement – The Organizational Level Information Requirements can be obtained by performing the following steps –

a. Defining the underlying subsystems :
i. Every organization is observed as a system.
ii. Every system further consists of a large number of the subsystems.
iii. The different subsystems are generally obtained by conducting various discussions of the organizational functions.
iv. The division of the systems in to the various subsystems is very much critical in the nature as with the help of this division the various requirements can be divided and hence, carrying out the whole process by the management becomes much more planned and very simpler in the nature and the working.

b. Developing the manager by the subsystem matrix –
i. The various organizational subsystems are in this step related with the specific managers and this is done with the help of the matrix format.
ii. The matrix is prepared by reviewing the different decision responsibilities of each of the manager, starting from the middle to the top.
iii. One is able to get a good picture of the decision making responsibility with great clarity.
iv. One also gets a very good and a clear picture of the various responsibilities.
v. One is able to recognize all those set of the managers that are to be interviewed relative to each of the sub-system.

c. Define and evaluate the information requirements for the organizational subsystem –
i. In this stage, the groups interviews are conducted of all those managers who possess the decision making responsibility for the various sub-systems.
ii. By performing the above step, the information requirements of each of the sub-system of the organization can be obtained.

2. Database requirements – The applications and the ad hoc queries give rise to the database requirements. The complete architecture for the database forms a major part of the organizational information requirement and helps a lot in meeting the different requirements. A very critical point to remember here is that for getting a very efficient and a detailed database, the requirements must be divided in to defining the data requirement that has been perceived by the different users and also in to defining the requirements for the physical design of the database.

3. Application Level Information Requirement – The information processing for a particular organizational activity or a specific organizational unit can be obtained with the help of the subsystem of the overall information system.

Types of the application level information requirement can be categorized as the follows –

a. Social requirements –
I. Also called as the Behavioral requirements.
II. Are based on the job design.
III. Provides the specification about the various objectives and the assumptions.

b. Technical requirements –
I. Are based on the information that is required for the performance of any type of the task.
II. Provides the specification about the inputs, the outputs, the data that has been stored and the various information processes.
III. The structure and the format of the data are very necessary in case of the technical requirements.
IV. Involve the interface requirements between the user system and the application system.