Describe the steps in the external acquisition process for information systems

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Most external acquisition processes have at least five general steps:

Systems planning and selection: The first phase of the SDLC is systems planning and selection. An organization must take care that only those projects that are critical to enabling the organization's mission, goals, and objectives are undertaken. Consequently, the goal of systems planning and selection is simply to identify, plan, and select a development project from all possible projects that could be performed.
Systems analysis: The second phase of the SDLC is called systems analysis. One purpose of the systems analysis phase is for designers to gain a thorough understanding of an organization's current way of doing things in the area for which the new information system will be constructed. The process of conducting an analysis requires that many tasks, or subphases, be performed. The first subphase focuses on determining system requirements. To determine the requirements, an analyst works closely with users to determine what is needed from the proposed system. After collecting the requirements, analysts organize this information using data, process, and logic modeling tools.
Development of a request for proposal: A request for proposal (RFP) is simply a document that is used to tell vendors what your requirements are and to invite them to provide information about how they might be able to meet those requirements. An RFP is sent to vendors who might potentially be interested in providing hardware and/or software for the system.
Proposal evaluation: The fourth step in external acquisition is to evaluate proposals received from vendors. This evaluation may include viewing system demonstrations, evaluating the performance of those systems, and examining criteria important to the organization and judging how the proposed systems "stack up" to those criteria. Demonstrations are a good way to get a feel for the different systems' capabilities.
Vendor selection: One way of doing this is by devising a scoring system for each of the criteria and benchmarking results. Companies may use other, less formalized approaches to evaluate vendors. Sometimes they use simple checklists; other times they use a more subjective process. Regardless of the mechanism, eventually a company completes the evaluation stage and selects a vendor, ending the external acquisition process.