At an early stage in the specification of a system, you should decide on the systemboundaries, that is, on what is and is not part of the system being developed. Thisinvolves working with system stakeholders to decide what functionality should beincluded in the system and what processing and operations should be carried out inthe system’s operational environment. You may decide that automated support forsome business processes should be implemented in the software being developed butthat other processes should be manual or supported by different systems. You shouldlook at possible overlaps in functionality with existing systems and decide wherenew functionality should be implemented. These decisions should be made early inthe process to limit the system costs and the time needed for understanding the system requirements and design.