1. INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, information system plays a crucial role in most business organisations.  The fast pace of technological advancement has leveraged the utilisation of information technology (IT) from organisations in their corporate strategic management planning (SMP).  An efficient SMP can no doubt assist organisations in improving their business performance.  However, organisations are still facing some obstacles and challenges when implementing their business strategies using IT.  Business management personnel have found it difficult to justify how much business benefit they can gain from the software they use to support them to achieve their business objectives such as increasing profitability, gaining competitive advantage.

On the other hand, the current climate of software development is still focusing on the analysis and design methods, programming and user interface techniques.  It only emphasises how to “produce software” rather than how to “deliver business solutions”.  Such effort cannot warrant the achievement of business objectives.  The bottom line problem lies to an absence of tools / methods to: (1) form a direct linkage between the business strategies and the day-to-day business operations; (2) reflect the way how the day-to-day business operations to support the designated business strategies; (3) ensure the software applications for supporting the business operations have met the business criteria; (4) to review the effectiveness of the business strategies against the ultimate business goals.

The above absenteeism is largely attributed to the communication gap between the business stakeholders and the software developers.  Hence this paper presents a Dynamic Business Object Architecture (DBOA) to integrate the information technology (IT) to business strategies.

 The motivation behind the DBOA development is to improve the communication between the business end-users and IT developers and to ensure ultimately the key business objectives are properly supported by the resulting software systems.  It can be summarised by the following issues:-
- to apply a technique to develop information system to support organisational strategic management planning and management decision making;
- to build a framework to identify organisation’s business strategies;
- to identify the processes underpinning  these business strategies;
-  to model these business processes into data manipulated object components hence to transform the literal based narrative statements into computer based software programs;
- to enhance the potential of object reuse thus to improve maintainability, to reduce costs, resources and time;
- to make business end users and IT developers to work closely together

The key linking abstraction in the DBOA approach is a new, coarser-grained and semantically richer notion of a Business Object.  Business Objects (BO’s) have been adopted by a broad range of developers in different areas such as: client/server distributed architecture [Casanave 95] [Sutherland 95], vertical industry application domain [Poirier et al 95] [Johnson et al 96] [Choudhury et al 97], workflow management [Schulze et al 96] [Baker 96] [Schulze 97] [Paul et al 97] [Beedle 97] [le Comte 97], business processes [Hertha et al 95] [Ramackers et al 95] [McCathy et al 95] [Guido et al 97] [Haugen 97], design patterns [Fowler 96] [Evitts 96].  These approaches are predominately software application driven.

The BOs used in the DBOA are driven by business strategy. It is a conceptual framework in identifying, modelling and mapping the business strategies onto supporting software systems, together with an associated management process, iterative prototyping lifecycle environment and end users’ involvement.

4.1 Business Object Development

DBOA is the development of a Business Object Architecture (BOA) developed under a Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) life-cycle environment.  The BOA contains a collection of BO’s where each BO co-ordinates four levels of activity namely: (1) Strategic Management Planning (SMP); (2) ISO9000 Standard Business Procedures for Business Processes; (3) Object-Oriented Business Process Modelling and (4) System Design and Integration with Legacy / Non-Legacy Database Systems.  Figure 1 illustrates the 4-level development of a Business Object.

4.1.1 Business Strategic Level:
The first level is the business strategic level where corporate business strategies are identified, examined and defined.  Strategic Management Planning (SMP) is created.  The SMP is set by the business domain experts who have in-depth knowledge in their business domain and it is one of the critical success factors to involve business end users in the system development.  SMP is comprised of various SMP maps which contain all the related factors, together with detailed definitions, to carry out different strategies.  The definitions are to assist the users to determine the context levels in the SMP checklists (to be created after the SMP maps) based on their organisation’s situation at the time of their assessment. The checklists serve the purpose of planning/implementing/reviewing how the software can support the SMP.  The checklists should be reviewed and updated periodically to reflect the degree of performance improvement.  The SMP assessment is to be rolled over through the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), an iterative prototyping lifecycle environment where business end-users and software developers work closely together.

4.1.2 Business Process Level:
The second level is the business process level where business processes are annotated to support specific strategies through the process improvement technique using the ISO9000 standard operating business procedures to identify and define the tasks and actions needed  to achieve the goals as set in the SMP.

4.1.3 Object-oriented Modelling Level:
The third level is the object-oriented (OO) modelling level where object models are developed, based on the business processes, using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) notations.  Business processes are modelled by UML notation.  By this stage, objects and classes have emerged corresponding to the key data storage concepts and generic business procedure components essential to the business in question.  These are demonstrably reusable across the various business strands captured through a series of case study projects.

4.1.4 DBMS and Legacy Systems Level:
The fourth level is the database management system level, a substrate of legacy and/or non-legacy information systems, which must interface with the OO layer in the BO in order to allow data take on and system configuration and integration with hybrid OO and Non-OO.
 
4.2 Business Object Architecture Development

The Business Object Architecture (BOA) as illustrated in Figure 2 is the framework in which individual BO’s are related according to the common strategies, processes, objects and database stored in their own repositories, thereby promoting the reuse of software components, business processes and business strategies within a business domain.

 

4.3 Dynamic Business Object Architecture Development

The Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) lifecycle provides an environment for BOA development.  An integrated approach is proposed and a DBOA is illustrated in Figure 3. Development phase is divided into five time-boxes namely:

4.3.1 Time-box 1: Feasibility Study
Business management personnel do the pre-project SMP checklist manual assessment exercise to reflect the current situation before meeting the business objectives. The function point table is created in this phase.

4.3.2 Time-box 2: Business Study
As a result of the pre-project SMP checklist manual assessment, those strategic factors not meeting the business objectives would be fed forward to the ISO9000 Standard Operating Procedures for Business Processes document.  The business processes are strongly linked to the objectives to meet.  The Object-oriented analysis & design UML standard notations are used to model the business processes.

4.3.3 Time-box 3: Functional Prototype
A prototype is created with the functionality enough for the users to test.  Users are allowed to change their business requirements.  Users’ feedback is collected and application will be modified for the next prototyping testing.  Design models and documentation are also updated in accordance with the user requirement changes.

4.3.4 Time-box 4: Design Prototype
By this stage, the application should have all the functionality agreed in the project.  Since time-boxing control is to ensure project will be delivered on time and within budget, in the design prototyping stage, users are not allowed to change their business requirements.  However, they can require changes in screen handling and user interface design.

4.3.5 Time-box 5: Implementation
The activities in time-box 5 include: system debugging, user acceptance testing, user training, system integration, configuration and system goes live.

4.3.6 Post-project review
The post-project review should take place 2-3 months after the system has gone live to allow enough time to evaluate the business performance against the business goals.  Business management personnel carry out a post-project SMP checklist manual assessment exercise.  Any failure of meeting the business objectives will trigger the modification of business processes, as well as system modelling and application development.  The SMP checklist manual assessment should take place a minimum of every 6 months.

 5. CONCLUSION

The DBOA has provided a mechanism to improve the communication gap between the software developers and the business management hence the essence of the software will become more strategically based and industry-focused.  The manual assessments on the SMP checklists during the pre- and post-project phases have enabled organisations to justify how the software can support their SMP.  The integration of IT to business is to raise the software developers’ awareness that when business strategies and software applications are linked together to form a single pool of knowledge, software development is more likely to support the business strategies hence to achieve the business goals.

6. FURTHER WORK

The underlying DBOA framework has been designed, to offer a complete conceptual framework and lifecycle basis for business application development.  A prototype business object repository, based on hyperlink documents and web-launched plug-in tools, has been developed.  An implementation of the DBOA through an e-commerce project case study is on-going.  At the time of submitting this paper, outstanding tasks include:-
- The post-project assessment of the SMP checklist with the business end-users to evaluate the DBOA against the SMP.  Any identified failures to meet business objectives will trigger the process improvement stage, which filters through the object modelling and application design.
- At the moment, the SMP checklists are still very generic for any organisations in any industries.  It is necessary to streamline the SMP checklists  by customising them to suit different business sectors.
- The development of an automated tool to link the SMP checklist templates to the ISO9000 Standard Operating Procedure for business process templates and the business process templates filter through the object modelling and application design to eliminate error prompt.

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OOPSLA'98 Business Object Workshop IV