Joseph Kramer

Industry Operations Architecture for Business Process Model Collections

The absence of a holistic industry-centric architecture for processes is an important BPM shortfall that impacts model collections. This paper introduces a Componentized Industry Business Architecture as a vehicle to address this gap and to make processes better integrated with other critical dimensions in organizational design. This architecture provides the foundation for a taxonomy of processes and enables process models to be created or potentially rationalized against a comprehensive framework.

Designing interactive systems for 1-to-1 e-commerce

E-commerce over the World-Wide Web has become a major application area for software development. The volume of goods and services transactions is rapidly growing. Economic theory and observations of the emerging markets suggest that e-commerce sellers will be driven towards offering personalized buying interactions and customized products to escape price wars, to create a distinguishable identity, and to establish longer lasting relationships with their customers.E-commerce applications providing personalized interaction is an interesting application area for a wide range of HCI research, including human searching and browsing in complex hypermedia spaces, information visualization, virtual reality, agent support for product selection, merchant selection, and negotiation, user modeling, and group-oriented work such as recommender systems. A large number of CHI professionals work actively on the design of commerce-oriented websites -- both for business-to-business as well as for business-to-consumer scenarios. Designers of e-commerce systems are in search for recommendations on what works or does not and are looking for new ideas, as the interest in previous activities on this topic (see below) has demonstrated. An indication for this are also the significant number of discussions on the CHI-WEB discussion group that center around HCI design issues for e-commerce applications. There is also an additional attractiveness to the domain as good design and good use of HCI principles can directly result in measurable outcomes showing that HCI can contribute to the bottom line; for example, if redesigns or new interactive features result in increases in sales, increases in eyeball share, reduction in aborted transactions, reduced return rates for ordered products and reduction in service calls.

Modeling Business Applications for Business Architecture

For several years the mantra has been “closing the Business – IT gap”, enabling business people to focus on strategic direction, while not being unnecessarily burdened by the complexity of the underlying support systems. The discipline of Business Architecture continues to evolve, attempting to bring rigor to the task of matching imprecise strategic needs to rigid IT systems. Increasingly literature acknowledges the need for precise connections between business needs and IT systems, however little usable guidance has been provided. This paper focuses narrowly but deeply at suggesting a precise way in which business applications and related elements of the business architecture can be modeled. It highlights the needs of business stakeholders and compares several existing models. The paper illustrates the inadequacy of these models in addressing our business questions, and proposes a model that offers some distinct advantages.

Participatory GUI design from task models

This tutorial provides practical experience in using an objectoriented (00) graphical user interface (GUI) design model, participatory 00 metho~, low-tech materials, and iterative usability testing, to design a GUI that confiorrns to multiple GUI platform styles. Participants turn user data (a previously done task flow) into a GUI design via the bridge of mapping the task flow into abstract task objects and mapping the task objects into GUI objects such as windows. They fill in the GUI’s foundation, such as the menus, by using multiplatforrn design guidelines.

Designing with the User in Mind a Cognitive Category Based Design Methodology

To design products and experiences that are highly intuitive and resonate with their target users the designer must have an accurate understanding of those users ‘mental models’. New research in cognitive science, in particular in the area of cognitive category theory, provides clues how to better elicit and apply mental models in design. The resultant outcome is guaranteed to be more natural and understandable to its users. In this paper we will briefly review the cognitive science research and describe our resultant empirically grounded concept and definition of a ‘mental model’. We then explain how we use the mental model and related design principles to build intuitive designs.

Defining Value When Managing IT Investments

Although there is a plethora of articles, conference papers on the subject of IT evaluation only a small subset has explicitly dealt with precisely what the term value means and how it can be used within IT investment decisions. Defining value is an important component of managing an investment portfolio. Drawing on practical experience and applied research in strategy development and portfolio management, this paper highlights several facets of value that are critical and practical to estimate and apply within the IT investment domain.

Discovering Service Opportunities through Capability Modeling

By definition, service processes include consumer and producer interactions and input to co-produce the service. They differ from traditional enterprise processes in that the latter are often focused only on internal activities. Given this distinction, an enterprise wishing to ascertain what services they ought to offer will be required to analyze their resources with a different lens than the one provided by traditional process frameworks. Such a lens which facilitates making that determination focuses on the companys capabilities that represent its proficiencies deemed to be of long-standing value. Conceptually, IBMs Component Business Modeling (CBM) model can provide this capabilities-oriented lens. In practice, however, in order to make it a viable option a rigorous set of rules are needed to ensure that the CBM model is complete and that it can potentially evolve so as to be governed by a business architecture organization. This paper offers concrete ways on how three of the aspects of business architecture, Enterprise Process Frameworks, business process models, and activities as defined by Component Business Modeling (CBM) can be combined to produce a capability framework able to support services identification. The paper provides rules that guide rigorous establishment of the required composite elements so that the resulting capability framework is consistent. The paper also describes how the Enterprise can perform investment analysis to prioritize spending across its portfolio of emerging potential service opportunities vis-à-vis its traditional projects. The context is an organization that is maturing its use of other models such as process frameworks and business process models in support of Business Process Management (BPM) and would like to uncover service opportunities.

Introduction to the Workshop on Business-Driven Enterprise Application Design & Implementation

A critical success factor for enterprise application development is to get the systems specifications validated early in the planning and development process. Specification errors that are identified early on in the process are easier and less costly to fix. However, all too frequently business users only discover the impact of specifications once a system is deployed. It is therefore important to provide business users with representations of the future system that enable them to quickly catch the ramifications of current application specifications.