2. More Big Ideas; Business Motivation and Strategies
DE + IA (INFO 243) - 22 January 2007
Bob Glushko
Plan for Today's Class
- More big ideas from Chapter 1
- The Business Case for DE + IA
- Accelerating RosettaNet
- HIT and MIS
- Assignment 1 -- Document Engineering in the News
More of Document Engineering's Big Ideas
- The Virtual Enterprise
- Overlapping Information Components as "Process Glue"
- The Document Type Spectrum
- Overview of the Document Engineering Approach
The "Virtual Bookstore"
- Scenario:
- Customer selects book from catalog on an online bookstore
- Customer pays with credit card
- Book arrives via express shipper two days later
- From the customer's perspective there is only one "transaction"
- But the bookstore is a "virtual enterprise" or "composite application" that follows the drop shipment pattern to coordinate the activities of 4 different service providers transacting with each other
- This coordination - or choreography - is carried out with document exchanges
Overlapping Information Models in the Virtual Bookstore
Document Component Architecture
Overlapping Components in Business Processes
Component-based User or Application Interfaces
Drop Shipment Pattern
- Our virtual bookstore follows the "Drop Shipment" pattern
- 4 roles of retailer (the catalog), distributor (the warehouse), the credit authority (bank), the delivery service
- The retailer doesn't own the goods, only takes orders
The Document Type Spectrum
The Document Type Spectrum – "Narratives" or "Publications"
- Authored by people
- Highly designed, with rich presentational characteristics correlated with semantics and structure
- Heterogeneous in structure and content
- Weakly datatyped – "just text"
The Document Type Spectrum – "Transactions"
- Created mechanically
- Few and somewhat arbitrary presentational characteristics
- Homogeneous in structure and content
- Strongly datatyped
A Hybrid Example: Catalog = Data (Document)
A Hybrid Example: Reference Book = Document (Data)
Systematic Variation Across the Spectrum
- Homogeneity
- Prescriptiveness
- Variety of data types
- Precision of data types
- Correlation between presentation, structure, and content
Processes that Involve Both Data and Documents
The Data/Document Chasm
- It's obviously a continuum... but transactional and narrative documents have traditionally been analyzed with different disciplines and use different tools, terminology, and techniques – little intersection
- Very different intellectual and domain roots
- "Document analysis" for narrative documents: literary criticism, graphical design; electronic publishing
- "Data modeling" for transactional documents: philosophy, linguistics, systems analysis; data automation
Crossing the Data/Document Chasm
- Document Engineering harmonizes the terminology and emphasizes what they have in common rather than highlighting their differences
- Identifying the presentational, content, and structural components and defining their relationships to each other
- Identifying "good" content components
- Designing, describing, and organizing components to facilitate their reuse
- Assembling hierarchical document models that organize components according to the requirements of a specific context for information exchange
Data/Document Driven {and,or,vs} Business Process Analysis
- The document analysis and data modeling approaches focus from the beginning on the structure and content of the "document payload" that will be exchanged – a "bottom up" approach that emphasizes "Does this work from a technical perspective?"
- In contrast, business process analysis begins with an abstract or broadly scoped perspective on business activities
- Emphasizes "Does this work from a business perspective?"
- Inherently a "top down" approach that starts with business models and processes and gets to the "document payloads" only at the end
{and,or,vs} User Task Analysis
- Task analysis (or user analysis) is the observation of people performing the tasks or use cases when the application or system must support human interfaces and not just other applications
- Task analysis and document analysis are closely related; document analysis reveals candidate information components and task analysis reveals rules about their intent and usage.
- Task analysis is especially important when few documents or information sources exist because human problems or errors can suggest that important information is missing
The Document Engineering Approach
Generic Justifications for DE + IA (Chapter 16)
- Reduce processing costs for goods and services
- Improve operational visibility and control
- Accelerate existing processes and enable new ones
- Publish cheaper, faster, better - reuse, repurpose, repackage information
- Reduce system development, maintenance, and integration costs
- Enhance employee and customer satisfaction
Reminder: Document Engineering in the News (17 January lecture)
- Intel, Wal-Mart and others Push Electronic Health Records
- FDA Sets Document Standards for Drug-Label Submissions
- Salesforce.com Connects its Front End to Back Ends
- SPEEDy Self-Service Comes to Airline Information Processes
- Global Shippers Give Customers Real-Time Cargo Info
- FedEx Kinko's Announces Web-based Printing, Tracking Services
- Disrupting Business Models with Document Assembly
Making The Business Case for DE + IA (Chapter 16)
- Compare processing cost and time per document in As-Is and To-Be cases
- Estimate value of other benefits
- Estimate resources and time required to analyze, design, and implement
- Calculate payback period / ROI by comparing recurring benefits against one-time costs
- Compare return against alternatives (including doing nothing)
A Checklist for Describing Case Studies
- D -- data types and document types
-
O -- organizational processes
-
C -- context (types of products or services, industry, geography, regulatory considerations)
-
U -- user types and special user requirements
-
M -- models, patterns, or standards that apply
-
E -- enterprises and eco systems (e.g., trading communities, standards bodies)
-
N -- the needs (business case) driving the enterprise(s)
-
T -- technology constraints and opportunities
"Accelerating RosettaNet"
"Accelerating RosettaNet" [1]
"Accelerating RosettaNet" [2]
- Linear is in the process of going from two national distributors to just one
"Accelerating RosettaNet" [3]
- Syncata Corporation (http://www.syncata.com) was engaged to automate the flow of purchase orders and order status between Arrow and Linear as well as the subsequent introduction of orders into Linear's back end systems
"Accelerating RosettaNet" [4]
-
Linear's implementation is one of the first deployments of Microsoft's Biztalk Server (http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.asp) Accelerator for
RosettaNet (http://www.rosettanet.org)
"Accelerating RosettaNet" [5]
- RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes were 3A4 and 3A7
"Accelerating RosettaNet" [6]
- Linear is planning to link up external partners and exchange inventory information with Arrow (PIP 4C1)
"HIT and MIS"
- What problems are efforts in healthcare automation and medical informatics trying to solve?
- Why does health care lag behind other industries in adopting IT?
- Why do EHRs differ so much and why does it matter?
- How could an EHR "not represent a single physical entity" and be "a functional view" assembled on demand?
Readings for 24 January
- Document Engineering, Chapter 2
- Document Engineering, Chapter 15 (pages 491-501)
Assignment 1 - Document Engineering in the News
- The complete instructions are linked to the syllabus entry for today's lecture
- Part 1: Apply the D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T case study checklist to "Accelerating RosettaNet" (a sentence or two per item)
- Part 2: Find a Document Engineering in the News story (as current as possible)
- 2.1 Write a 100-word summary of the story
- 2.2 Post the URL or bibliographic citation to the story to the course list serve along with your 100-word summary.
- 2. 3 Apply the D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T case study checklist to it (a sentence or two per item)
- 2.4 Discuss briefly (100 words) some aspect of the story that is similar to or reminds you of one of the 7 news stories from the 17 January lecture
- Submit all of your work in Parts 1 and 2 using the homework upload system
- Due by 9am on Monday 5 February, but given the need to claim your story by posting to the list serve, don't wait until the last minute to start looking for it
