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ChaPter 4 • InformatIon GatherInG: InteraCtIve methods 111

COnsUlting OppORtUnity 4.2

Skimming the Surface

You are about to leave SureCheck Dairy after a preliminary product line (it includes whole, skim, 2 percent, and 1 percent
tour, when another member of your systems analysis team calls milk, half-and-half, cottage cheese, yogurt, and frozen novel-
you at the dairy to say he cannot make his interview appointment ties). Sales managers are currently sending their sales figures
with the plant manager because of illness. The plant manager via the Web to corporate headquarters, 600 miles away, and
is extremely busy, and you want to keep his enthusiasm for the even the production of online reports seems slow. You will base
project going by doing things as scheduled. You also realize that your ad-libbed questions on what you have just found out on
without the initial interview data, the rest of your data gathering the tour.
will be slowed. Although you have no interview questions pre- In the few minutes before your interview begins, decide
pared, you make the decision to go ahead and interview the plant on a structure for it: funnel, pyramid, or diamond. In a para-
manager on the spot. graph, justify why you would proceed with the interview
You have learned that each sales manager at SureCheck is inter- structure you have chosen based on the unusual context of this
ested in processing their own data and producing their own reports interview. Write a series of questions and organize them in the
on quantities and kinds of dairy products sold so that they can use structure you have chosen.
that information to better control production of the company’s large

when a story is told and retold, even handed down over time, the story takes on a mythic quality.
Isolated stories are welcome when you are looking for facts, while enduring stories capture all
aspects of the organization. Enduring stories are the ones a systems analyst should be looking for.
There are four purposes for telling a story: experiential, explanatory, validating, and pre-
scriptive. Experiential stories describe what the business or industry is like. Explanatory stories
tell why the organization acted a certain way. Validating stories are used to convince people that
the organization made the correct decision. Prescriptive stories tell the listener how to act.
Systems analysts can use storytelling as a complement to other information gathering meth-
ods such as interviewing, JAD, and surveys. You need to engage organizational participants by
reacting to stories, matching one story to another by recounting it to other participants, and even
collaborating with the participant to reframe and understand organizational stories. It is a good
way to deeply understand some of the problems associated with information systems use, sys-
tems development, systems adoption, and designing for your intended audience.
We have observed that many of the stories that systems analysts have reported on in the
past have been mere fragments of stories. The intent or purpose of the story is not understood,
and therefore the analyst is not able to fully understand the importance of the story. The systems
analyst needs to listen to the story as a whole in order to truly understand its content and purpose.

Joint Application Design

No matter how adept you become as an interviewer, you will inevitably experience situations in
which one-on-one interviews do not seem to be as useful as you would like. Personal interviews
are time consuming and subject to error, and their data are prone to misinterpretation. IBM
developed an alternative approach to interviewing users one by one, called joint application
design (JAD). The motivations for using JAD are to cut the time (and hence the cost) required
by personal interviews, to improve the quality of the results of information requirements assess-
ment, and to create more user identification with new information systems as a result of the
participative processes.
Although JAD can be substituted for personal interviews at any appropriate juncture during
the SDLC, it has usually been employed as a technique that allows you, as a systems analyst, to
accomplish requirements analysis and to design the user interface jointly with users in a group
setting. The many intricacies of this approach can only be learned in a paid seminar demonstrat-
ing proprietary methods. We can, however, convey enough information about JAD here to make
you aware of some of its benefits and drawbacks in comparison with one-on-one interviews.