As IT architects, it may often find themselves in a dilemma - the former have a business goal, after the IT system.Both have large, difficult to change and flexibility characteristics of the poor, development of business objectives and developers who may not understand the system, the contents of each other's work and achievements.
Business people use a language to express their hope to achieve business goals, and developers are using another language to express the technical requirements.And this is what we need in order to achieve high efficiency tackled the question: understanding the two languages and perform the necessary conversion in order to reflect the business needs of IT can and can at the appropriate time to make changes to the business objectives to match ITthe ability to adapt.This is not an easy task for, but you can get great benefits is the reason.
One word: use case
In the business case, the participants are stakeholders, and the system is the business itself.
With the movie "The Graduate" in the way, I just want to say one word: use case.For many years, we will use case model for the application.Now, in the service-oriented architecture (SOA), we also used this concept to the business model.
In Alistair Cockburn's "Writing Effective Use Cases" book, he will use case is defined as "the system stakeholders on the system behavior between the agreements."Use cases must be defined for system-wide, to represent this case, the main participants in using the system point of view, and a consistent level of abstraction can be said that use of participants in the system.
For example, the stock exchange Web site, a use case is "buy shares", which allows users to buy shares through this site.The use case describes the customer what to do and how to respond to the site, the site will be temporarily ignored how to actually implement this behavior.
Use cases can be used to model the service; I call this service use cases.When the service use case description, participants are service users, service providers and the system was.As with any use case, this time focused on the service provider which acts, not how to implement the act.
Can also be used for business use case model.In the business case, the participants are stakeholders - business users (such as customers or employees, even shareholders or government regulators), and the system is the business itself (produce goods and sell them to the customer's company.)How to conduct business?Customers want business to start?They are willing to pay for what services or products?How to conduct business employees need to complete their work?The key is how these stakeholders interact with the company, these are the business use cases.
Obtained after the business case, you can then link them together to form a business process - the company can perform the procedure.The process itself is the business use cases, and complex business case can be considered as business processes.Simply put, these processes show the company what to do and how to do it.As mentioned earlier, processes, and in each step of the process model of service.
Through the use cases as part of the company or companies modeling business processes composed of ground services, the next goal is to achieve as much as possible the automation of processes and services.Application to achieve this automation is the use of service-oriented architecture applications, and is now under way SOA practice.
Recording process
If customers do not understand the business, the architect defines the system requirements for the effective risk is very small.
I discussed with the client program or the development of new work, will immediately understand the business stakeholders are present or represented.Then, I will want to get a good track record of business processes and data requirements.Unless the relevant work is a "virgin land", or some new application or functionality will support existing and future business processes have a good understanding of business processes.Regardless of which approach, if the customer did not understand the business, the architect defines the system requirements for effective risk very small.
I personally agree with the scene to record the development of business process services, business scenario allows the business issues identified in the context of system requirements.
Determine the future business needs, if they can maintain a functional and non functional requirements of a line item list is also very good.I strongly endorsed the use of tools to manage requirements; To achieve this, I recommend the use of IBM Rational RequisitePro.
Determined based on business scenarios by using the initial set of requirements, we can begin the process of defining system behavior.This can be called a joint application development (JAD) session to a series of initial line item under the requirements of the system to enrich the future.By JAD session, the architect together with stakeholders to determine desired system behavior, and as a basis for recording use cases and scenarios.Through the detailed use cases and scenarios to help define the final series of functional and non functional requirements.