Software Methods for Business Reengineering

✍ Scribed by Alfs Berztiss (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 274
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

It is said that business re-engineering is part of our transition to a post-industrial society. The purpose of this book is to present an approach to how to reorganize businesses using the discipline of software engineering as a guiding paradigm. The author's thesis is that software engineering provides the necessary analytical expertise for defining business processes and the tools to transform process descriptions to support systems.
The author begins by introducing the concepts and needs for business reengineering and principles and practice of software engineering. He then shows how by concentrating on processes, a business can define the information base required and how it is to be constructed. As a result, any manager or technically-minded person will learn how to implement the reengineering of a business.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xiv
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
The Established and the Reengineered....Pages 3-11
Business Reengineering is Not New....Pages 12-16
The Purpose of Reengineering....Pages 17-21
Steps in the Reengineering Effort....Pages 22-29
Making the Most of Human Resources....Pages 30-36
The Nature of a Process....Pages 37-41
Front Matter....Pages 43-43
Engineering Principles in Software Development....Pages 45-58
Classification of Software....Pages 59-64
Modularization and Requirements Engineering....Pages 65-72
Software Quality Attributes....Pages 73-82
The Software Development Process....Pages 83-93
Software Cost and Risk Estimation....Pages 94-99
Front Matter....Pages 101-101
Analysis of Business Activities....Pages 103-110
Individual Interviews....Pages 111-114
Group Sessions....Pages 115-121
Business Process Prototyping....Pages 122-125
Front Matter....Pages 127-127
From Natural Language to Entities and Relationships....Pages 129-137
State Transitions and Control Flows....Pages 138-142
Control Flows in Terms of Petri Nets....Pages 143-149
From ER Diagrams to Information Modules....Pages 150-156
Front Matter....Pages 127-127
From Flow Diagrams to Process Modules....Pages 157-162
Validation of the Blueprint....Pages 163-167
Front Matter....Pages 169-169
Specification of Business Processes....Pages 171-175
The Specification Language SF....Pages 176-184
An SF Specification: An Editorial Office....Pages 185-195
A Case Study: Order Processing....Pages 196-203
Front Matter....Pages 205-205
The Reengineering Process....Pages 207-212
Determination of Priorities....Pages 213-218
Legacy Software....Pages 219-223
The Communication Infrastructure....Pages 224-229
User Interfaces....Pages 230-236
Maintainability and Reusability....Pages 237-245
Back Matter....Pages 247-275

✦ Subjects

Business Information Systems; Operations Research/Decision Theory