Causal model for lifecycle management practices of information systems (case study: information systems providers enterprises in Tehran)

Each software product has a lifecycle that starts with meeting the users’ needs or as a concept of new product, and finishes by disposing. Therefore, the software products lifecycle includes all activities related to product development, operation and maintenance. The main goal of this article is to identify the dimensions and the measures contained in an information system’s lifecycle and the steps that should be taken at every stage. These measures are obtained by studying the research literature, and then are refined by confirmatory factor analysis. Thus, questionnaires are distributed among software developers in Tehran. After identifying the key indices, their effectiveness and impacts on each other are measured by Dematel technique; then accordingly they are ranked and the casual model of the measures of information systems’ lifecycle is designed. For this purpose, a number of questionnaires are also distributed among the experts and developers of information systems. The results show that finding a good idea for manufacturing a product is the most important effort, and then the ones such as product design, coding, prototyping, operation by customer, product manufacturing, support and maintenance, product disposal and distribution are important respectively.