Business Area Analysis
In the information engineering book Martin define business fields analysis in the following manner which are: Business areas analysis(BAA) develop a detailed framework for building an information-based enterprise. It analyzes it in detail and takes one business area at a time. It uses matrices and diagrams to record and model the activities and data in the enterprise and to give a clear understanding of the elaborate and subtle ways in that the information aspects of the enterprise interrelate.
In the during of BAA our focus shifts from the world view to the domain view. In to the model the elaborate and subtle ways in that the information aspects of the enterprise interrelate the information engineer must depict how data objects define during ISP and refined during BAA are used and transformed within every business field and how the business processes and functions within every business area transform these data objects. In essence both endogenous and exogenous data are analyzed and modelled for each business field.
To make complete this work BAA makes use a number of various models;
- Data models
- Process flow models
- Process decomposition diagrams
- A variety of cross-reference matrices
The data objects describe during ISP are refined for use within each business fields. Example for the data object customer defines in the preceding section is used through the sales department. After evaluation of the requirement of the sales department an analysis of the sales domain the real definition of customer is future refined to meet the require of sales:
Object: Customer
Attributes: Name
Company name Æ Object Company
Purchase authority and Job classification
Contact information and Business addresses
Product interest(s)
Past purchase(s)
Date of last contact record of contacts
Status of contact - status of last contact
Æ next contact date
Æ recommended nature of contact
By the attribute company has been change to point to another object called Company. This object holds not only the company name but additional information about the company size, its buy requirements and the name of other contacts and so on. This information will be useful in the sales domain. Other attributes have been changed and added as noted above.