The business issues of today are global in nature, for instance, organizational objectives may be as varied as increasing profits, obtaining faster product life cycles, or increasing the competition at a global level. To get more value out of a business, people tend to re-engineer the business process. Development of information systems today is mostly the process of bringing improvements to the existing system, as part of a large business change initiative, and systems development efforts that do not address these problems tend to be incomplete or inefficient. As a result, the introduction of various applications and architectures is becoming increasingly common. New and different technologies such as telecommunication, artificial intelligence, image processing, multimedia, object orientation, as well as various applications such as batch or on-line transaction processing, process control, decision support, and work flow support are increasingly being introduced to improve the performance of business processes. Information systems development is changing, and the types of systems being built are much more varied and complex.
Tutorial: Web-based Information Systems Development