INTEGRATED DIAGRAMMATIC REPRESENTATIONS FOR DATADESIGN IN COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES

摘要

To make business processes work effectively, it is critical for workers to communicate and collaborate with eachrnother. Especially, when designing supporting systems for collaborative processes, the business experts and thernprofessional systems designer have to communicate effectively, though they have different viewpoints to thernsystem. Business experts prefer capturing general view of the entire system. On the other hand, system designersrnrequire detailed information without ambiguity. This fact sometimes results in communication problems. To solvernthis problem we propose to integrate the methods developed for each of them to facilitate the design process. Wernintroduce two methods, IDEF0 and Multi-Context Map (MCM). Both methods are designed to analyzerncollaborative processes and produce function models, though the target user is quite different. IDEF0 is a simplernand a flexible method, and is mainly used as a communication tools among collaborators who are not familiarrnwith complex notations, such as business experts. On the other hand, MCM produces a precise description, and isrnfor professional system designers and engineers, who require detailed information without ambiguity. MCM hasrnricher syntax and defines the collaboration tasks in detail. MCM is powerful when formalizing complexrnrequirements, though some collaborators may prefer simple methods they are used to, such as IDEF0, to MCM.rnTo support the exchange of information between MCM and IDEF0, we develop a bi-directional converterrnbetween them. In this paper, we propose two methods of designing E-R models that is useful for database designrnbetween business experts and professional system engineers. In many cases, the process of designing databasesrnstill relies on professional system engineer’s intuition. This fact sometimes causes the information amongrnbusiness experts not to be captured properly in the requirements because of the communication problemsrnbetween business experts and professional systems engineers. Our methods facilitate the process of sharingrninformation between them, and enable the designer to reflect the information properly in the requirements. Onernof the methods is extracting E-R models from well-disciplined IDEF0 diagrams to facilitate business experts inrndesigning databases, and the other is from both MCM and CLM, which enable the systems designer to capturerndetailed data structure of the databases. The function models enable the designers to define the scope of thernsystem effectively, which is very difficult by using only the data models. We conclude our paper by evaluating ourrnmethods.