A business process sketching effort can have different scopes depending on context and need, and made be used for
further analysis and the development and deployment of the business process. Six such scenarios are listed below.
Scenario #1-Organization Chart
You may want to build a simple map of the organization and its processes to get a better understanding of what the
requirements are on the application you are building. In this case, business process sketching is part of the
software-engineering project, primarily performed during the inception phase. These types of efforts often start out as
merely charting with no intent of changing the organization, however, in reality, building and deploying a new
application always includes some level of business improvement..
Scenario #2-Domain Modeling
If you are building applications with the primary purpose of managing and presenting information, such as an order
management system or a banking system, you may choose to build a model of that information at a business level, without
considering the workflows of the business. This is referred to as domain modeling. Typically, domain modeling is part
of the software-engineering project, and is performed during the inception and elaboration phases of the project.
Scenario #3-One Business Many Systems
If you are building a large system, or a family of applications, you may have one business process
sketching effort that will serve as input to several software-engineering projects. The business process
sketches help you find functional requirements, and they serve as input to building the architecture of the
application family. The business process sketching effort is, in this case, often treated as a project on its own.
Scenario #4-Generic Business Process Sketches
If you are building an application that will be used by several organizations-for example, a sales support application
or a billing application -it
can be useful to go through a business process sketching effort to align the organizations as to how they do their
business to avoid requirements that are too complex for the system. If aligning the organizations is not an option,
however, a business process sketch effort can help you understand and manage differences in how the organizations
will use the application and will make it easier to determine which application functionality should be prioritized.
Scenario #5-New Business
If an organization has decided to start a completely new line of business, and will build information systems to
support it, a business process sketching effort needs to be performed. In this case, the purpose of
business process sketching is not only to find requirements on systems, but also to determine the feasibility
of the new line of business. The business process sketching effort is, in this case, often treated as a project on its
own.
Scenario #6-Revamp
If an organization has decided to completely revamp their way of doing business, business process
sketching is often one or several projects in its own right. Typically, business reengineering is done in several
stages: envision the new business, reverse-engineer the existing business, forward-engineer the new business, and
install the new business.
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