Sys/planr: a decision-support tool for his planning
George Kolenaty, Marc Holland · 2005
An automated decision-support tool useful for formulating, modeling, and evaluating alternative application software development, operation, and maintenance approaches commonly required when developing HIS plans and implementation strategies is described. Optimizing the selection and sequencing of multiple, often interrelated development projects is an important and challenging aspect of HIS planning. Optimization must consider a variety of technical, managerial, organizational, and financial variables and requires that a large number of feasible combinations of variables -- or scenarios -- be evaluated. Performed manually, these evaluations are time-consuming and costly. Consequently, many organizations that periodically prepare an overall HIS master plan evaluate only a limited number of plan alternatives. This increases the risk of basing the HIS implementation strategy on a suboptimum, high-cost alternative. In the most extreme case, the adopted plan alternative based on limited number of analyzed plan alternatives may be outright unworkable. sys/PLANR allows the user/planner to formulate and describe a number of plan alternatives, and then submit each plan alternative for evaluation. sys/PLANR analyzes each plan version for its impact on the organization automation objectives as if each such plan alternative was actually executed in the real-world.