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

Defining and obtaining proper functionality in large scale software de velopment efforts, within time and budgetary constraints, continues to be a major problem. This paper focuses on the vagueness of the ''logi cal model '' concept as a key factor, due to a basic lack of understan ding of the fundamental characteristics of systems and of the business problems we are attempting to solve with automation. McMenamin & Palm er's (1984) delineation of ''essential systems analysis '' is presente d and explained as a solution to this problem. Applicability of essent ial systems analysis to distributed processing and object-oriented ana lysis is also discussed.