Information Systems Analysis and Design Project
Team
College of Business, San Francisco State University
Professor: Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Information Systems Department
MBA Students:
Lawrence Frelot
Ilya Kalpin
Qizhi Liu
Robert Meyer
Ralston Paes
Introduction
This semester our team had the distinct privilege to work on a special project pertaining to OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), a non-profit association wholeheartedly engaged in a humanitarian effort to revolutionize the way the world’s poorest children learn, share, create, and collaborate. OLPC’s mission is “to provide educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. To accomplish this mission, OLPC developed the ‘XO’ laptop, a low-cost and innovate computer.
Now that we have a general overview of OLPC, let’s examine the specifics of our project. We were informed that OLPC is dealing with an information flow problem. The purpose of this project is to harness and apply our knowledge to diagnose and analyze ways in which OLPC’s information systems could be improved. This documentation includes the following deliverables: a mind map, context diagrams, use cases, a data flow diagram, and an Entity Relationship diagram.
Maps and Diagrams
The mind map encapsulates the Support, Deployment, and Contribution areas. For the context diagrams, we built one at a project-wide level and one at the Contributor Program level. Note that the use cases, data flow diagrams, and Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram is for the Contributor Program only. These diagrams may help as a blueprint for further work. They may be seen ideally as a foundation for designing more efficient information systems. Many technologies could certainly evolve from these documents. In particular, a database and user-friendly forms for the Contributor Program could be constructed. Please note that these deliverables were created using information gathered from the following sources: phone conferences and face-to-face interviews with OLPC personnel, secondary research, and Dr. Sameer Verma’s lectures.
Mind Map
The FreeMind diagram (
Source file:File:SFSU ISAD mindmap.mm) was used to conceptualize the OLPC organization’s processes that were to be analyzed during the project. These processes included the Contributor Program, Support, and Deployment. With the diagram, the goals were to understand the roles of each group within the organization, their relationships to one another, and to discern areas for improvement.
The following will be posted shortly.