Requirements for Enterprise Architecture: First Look

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Traditional requirements happen after a multi-system architecture has been defined. But what about the requirements that feed into that architecture? The requirements that drive the enterprise architecture decisions in the first place? We haven’t talked about those before.

Global Processes and Business Rules

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We’ve written before about the importance of separating rules from requirements, particularly in use cases. We wrote that with the goal in mind of reducing the costs of system maintenance. Low-level rules like decision, calculation and inference rules tend to change frequently – and independently of other requirements. So a […]

Use Case vs. Process Flow – Failure Handling

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Should you use use cases or process flow diagrams to document business requirements? At some level, they both document the same thing, they just document it differently. The best requirements will come from doing both – but what if you are forced to choose one? What are the tradeoffs between use cases and process flows? In this article we look at the documentation of failure handling.

2007 – The Year of the Business Analyst

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Outsourcing is gaining momentum not only as a way to reduce costs, but as a way to create global teams. This trend is driving an increase in demand for business analysts. The change in perspective is driving companies to think about how they manage their business in new ways, and driving interest in new tools for business analysts to achieve these goals.

Business Rules And Requirements

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What is the difference between a business rule and a business requirement? Does the difference matter? A business requirement is something that is multi-customer, and a business rule represents a single customer’s approach to meeting that requirement. Product managers and analysts care about both, but product managers emphasize requirements, and analysts focus more on rules.

Cost Reduction Potential

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All process improvements are not created equal. How should we select which processes (or process steps) to improve? How do we approach this for a really large migration project? Start with understanding the potential for improvement and then narrow it down from there.