Enterprise data management objectives are often met by stepping outside of a pure “data” focus and getting involved with other critical enterprise initiatives, in particular business process change, and the delivery of custom-developed or purchased applications. Data management professionals therefore will benefit from skills in business process analysis and requirements definition.

This workshop presents a practical, proven, and integrated set of model-based techniques for working with business processes and requirements. At enterprises of all sizes they have been relevant to the business, useful to developers, and surprisingly popular with Agile teams. (Come to the workshop to find out why!)

We’ll open with a quick review of bad advice in the world of business analysis (think “effective written requirements”), the consequences of applying it, and why it just doesn’t work. Next, we’ll look at methods for discovering, scoping, assessing, mapping, and redesigning business processes. Then, we’ll cover related techniques for discovering, documenting, and verifying application requirements using business service specifications (essential in a SOA environment,) and a unique form of use cases. In both cases, we’ll see how to make business-friendly concept models (conceptual data models) a vital technique.

Some of the questions that will be answered include:

• How can I develop useful models of end-to-end processes within my natural lifetime?
• When should I stop modelling the process and shift to other forms to capture requirements?
• Why separate use cases into external (use case) and internal (services) perspectives?
• How can I stay at the right level? How do I avoid the “deep dive for detail?”
• What’s the role of our old friend, data modeling, in all of this?