BUSINESS ANALYSIS

Business Analysis

Business Analysis

Several phases and tasks for the methodology have been identified. Involvement in the information system's design stage makes the process much easier to implement. In most cases, designing a new system involves incorporating your requirements or specifications and the results of your business process models into the design of the new system.

More specifically, steps for designing new systems include 1) a description and analysis of the business processes by means of a technique known as “modern structured analysis,” and 2) recommendations for implementing the Functional Requirements for Recordkeeping and the Metadata Specifications.

Step 1: DESCRIBING AND MODELING BUSINESS PROCESSES

In this initial step of the methodology, the primary goal is to construct a representation of the logical processes of the business, i.e., to create a conceptual model of the work or activities that must be undertaken no matter how the information system is implemented or who does the work. To identify these processes, the methodology uses concepts derived from "modern structured analysis" techniques such as those advocated by Stephen McMenamin, John Palmer, and Edward Yourdan. This form of analysis has been defined as “a process-cantered technique that is used to model business requirements for a system. The models are structured pictures that illustrate the processes, inputs, outputs, and files required to respond to business events.” [Jeffrey L. Whitten and Lonnie D. Bentley, Systems Analysis and Design Methods, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), p. 122.

Description of the business requirements is undertaken by means of a process known as decomposition. This process is a means of developing a top-down analysis of the business system, and of breaking down the business system into smaller and smaller processes and sub-processes. In accordance with “modern structured analysis” techniques, the IU methodology decomposes logical processes (business activities that must be undertaken no matter how one implements the system) into three components: Functions, Event Processes or Transactions, and Elementary Processes. In other words, business systems are comprised of functions, which are decomposed into business processes, which ultimately are reduced to business events, which normally represent a single process responding to external and temporal inputs and result in one or more outputs known as elementary processes.

In the decomposition process, the activities at the highest end of the business system are known as business functions. A function is a “set of related and on-going activities of the business. A function has no start or end; it just continuously performs its work as needed.” (Whitten and Bentley, Systems Analysis and Design Methods, p. 218). Functions normally are decomposed into sub-functions or into a more discrete and related set of on-going activities. Functions are named with nouns that describe the entire set of activities. Examples of functions and sub-functions from the business area of Office of the Registrar include: Function: Student Recordkeeping - Sub-functions: Official student record maintenance, student degree maintenance, current semester information maintenance.

Functions consist of business processes that respond to business events. A business event is “something that 'happens and that causes business data ...