Business and processing requirements

Friesen (2013) distinguishes business requirements as project summary and objectives; target audience; perception and tone; branding elements; communication strategy; competitive positioning; types of content; marketing and promotion; design process; testing, prototyping and approval; maintenance; and schedule. Business requirements do not necessarily document functions that a system must support but describe what part of these functions can be made available through the system. These requirements contribute to the look and feel of the system, identify the audience and determine what is generally needed for the application. Consequently, project summary and objective; target audience; content design and processing; testing, prototyping and approval; and maintenance are deemed relevant to the planning of the system and are discussed below to guide the development and ensure that the application meets its goals.

According to DiBiase et al. (2006), self-assessment instruments not only help determine whether programmes meet educational objectives, they also assist prospective students to choose educational programmes that align with their interests and career goals. Content and credits are therefore the preferred requirements for meeting the objectives of the GISc SAT. The result should contribute to the primary aim of this research, namely to develop a method for assessing the competencies of individuals applying for professional registration and for evaluating the content of academic programmes for accreditation purposes. The content of the assessment report should inform the assessor if a programme (qualification) adequately covers the content and credit requirements specified in the competency set.

Possible users of the tool include programme developers (i.e. education institutions), programme assessors (i.e. accreditation panels), applicants (i.e. individuals applying for registration with the professional body) and HR departments (i.e. HR practitioners, employers and employment agencies).

To meet the objective of assessing the competencies of individuals applying for professional registration and for evaluating the content of academic programmes for accreditation purposes, the system needs to evaluate programmes and applications according to some quantitative value that determines an acceptable degree of conformity. The primary content of the SAT is the GISc framework consisting of knowledge areas (KAs) and units as well as the university academic programme comprising modules that relate to certain subject areas. Whereas the BoK does not provide for any quantitative guidelines at KA, unit or topic levels, the PLATO model stipulates the required lecture hours and percentage of lecture hours per subject area. The SAQA (South Africa 1995) and the Council on Higher Education (CHE 2004a; 2004b) provide additional guidelines in the form of notional hours and they define that every ten notional hours is equivalent to one credit offered in an academic programme. In GISc modules, one credit roughly equates to 2.5 lecture hours (i.e. a 16-credit module would include about 40 lecture hours). Given that the number of notational hours and lecture hours can be inferred from the number of credits and also that credits are the CHE standard, a credit-based quantification of GISc requirements was adopted for the GISc framework and applied in the SAT.

Each KA is assigned a number of credits based on the lecture hours derived from the PLATO academic model. For example, KA DN (Data Manipulation) in the GISc framework was assigned 90 lecture hours in the PLATO model or 36 SAQA credits according to the National Qualifications Framework (NQF). The KA DN consists of two units and a number of topics in each unit. In this research the credits assigned to the KA are divided between the number of

units, i.e. 18 credits for each unit, and topics were not included as an additional level in the new GISc framework. However, should universities and the professional body accept the new GISc framework, it is recommended that both the academic model prescribed by the professional body and the related programmes offered at universities should include detail and credits at the topic level.

In essence, the SAT must follow a procedure to compare the competency sets, i.e. the university academic programme with the GISc framework. The procedure must:

Match the credits of the units in the GISc framework with the content of modules in the university programme being evaluated on a pro rata basis (e.g. 5% of a module can be associated with a particular unit).

Keep track of the total number of credits assigned to each module and ensure that the total number of associated credits does not exceed the total number of credits of a particular module (i.e. stop the user from associating core units to a particular module once 100% of its credits have been allocated). Identify the KAs that are not adequately covered by comparing the total number of matched credits with the total number of credits per KA.

Sum the total matched credits and compare these with the total core-unit credits in the competency set to determine the overall level of compliance.

The aim of these rules is to provide an objective and consistent compliance rating for each programme that is assessed. The resulting compliance rating must be stored in a database so that users can refer to previous assessments. The functional requirements for such a system are dealt with in more detail in the next section.