Patel , D., Sutherland, J., Miller, J., (Eds.) Business Object Design
and Implementation V: OOPSLA'99 Workshop Proceedings. Springer, 1999 (full
text available at the Workshop).Kitty Hung 1, Matthias Kraner 2,
Srba Cvetkovic 3
Department of Computer Science
Business organisations
are constantly facing competition. There is a growing awareness amongst many organisations that a strategic
approach has to be adopted to retain competitiveness. Nowadays, information technology (IT) underpins
the implementation of most business strategies. However, IT solutions frequently fail to deliver
business benefits. One of the main causes
of failure is the communication gap that exists between the business management
and IT professionals. Whilst this program
continues to be the subject of extensive inter-disciplinary research, a reliable,
generally applicable, low cost, low risk and any easy to implement solution,
is yet to be found.
This paper seeks
to exploit the potential contribution how some new and emerging technologies
may offer to bridging, or at least reducing, this gap. A novel conceptual model, called Dynamic
Business Object Architecture (DBOA), has been developed starting from the well
know and already established concept of Strategic Management Planning
(SMP). The SMP implementation is based
on the combination of Object-Orientation (OO), Business Objects (BOs), Business
Object Architecture (BOA) and Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM). The DBOA approach was then evaluated through
an extensive case study carried out in the credit insurance sector.
The principal
findings of the case study clearly demonstrated the capability of DBOA to
reduce the communication gap significantly by ensuring the IT professionals
retain their business focus throughout the development lifecycle. In addition, the DBOA minimised the risk of
omitting any of the essential stages throughout the implementation process. Moreover, DBOA provided a review mechanism
for ‘continuous improvement’ of business performance, thus further enhancing
the reliability of this approach. The
case study provided an early indication that DBOA may also be generally
applicable as its implementation required only a few relatively minor sector specific
modifications. This particular finding
supports the claim that DBOA can be expected to provide a low cost and an easy
to implement solution to the communication gap problem.
Patel , D., Sutherland, J., Miller, J., (Eds.) Business Object Design
and Implementation V: OOPSLA'99 Workshop Proceedings. Springer, 1999 (full
text available at the Workshop).
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