ESSENTIAL SYSTEMS-ANALYSIS - BASIC PRINCIPLES FOR EVALUATING AND ORIENTING THE FIELD OF INFORMATION ENGINEERING

Defining and obtaining proper functionality in large scale software development efforts, within time and budgetary constraints, continues to be a major problem. This paper focuses on the vagueness of the ''logical model '' concept as a key factor, due to a basic lack of understanding of the fundamental characteristics of systems and of the business problems we are attempting to solve with automation. McMenamin & Palmer's (1984) delineation of ''essential systems analysis '' is presented and explained as a solution to this problem. Applicability of essential systems analysis to distributed processing and object-oriented analysis is also discussed.