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4.6. TRANSFORMING CUSTOMER NEEDS INTO BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS

Customer needs are often initially expressed as awareness in relatively general and ill-formed terms. These needs, values, expectations, and perceptions can be categorized by customer type and are usually in response to one of the following situations:


Customer Type Situation Business system components
 
User/Beneficiary Unfulfilled need Product functionality and service features
  Criticism Product/service features, quality, timeliness
  Poor sales Competition on product/service pricing, quality
Owner/funder Poor performance Process and infrastructure components
Regulator Illegal acts Service and management components
Management Poor performance Process and infrastructure components
  Low profits Product/service and competition components
Workforce Poor performance Development, empowerment, reward elements
  Unsafe workplace Management and environmental components

Customer needs must be articulated in more detail into business requirements and constraints. The quality and value to customers of the resulting products and services depends heavily on the business requirements being correct, complete, and robust -- easy to modify in order to meet future customer needs. In order to ensure completeness and robustness, customer needs are transformed and articulated in requirements for each business system component in sequence, working from outcome backward to provider:

  1. Product
  2. Service
  3. Process
  4. Management
  5. Workforce
  6. Expertise          Components 4-7 can be designed in parallel
  7. Infrastructure

Users and regulators specify external business requirements in terms of value components:

  • Specify product attributes:
    • Functionality and features
    • Customization and personalization
    • Reliability and durability
    • Ease of use, learning, and repair
    • Aesthetics
    • Innovation and extendability
  • Specify customer service attributes:
    • Pre-sale: product information and marketing
    • Transaction: features bundling, pricing, and payment
    • Post-sale: delivery, repairs, and advice
  • Specify pricing and cost attributes:
    • Monetary costs and pricing: purchase, maintenance, and upgrades
    • Time costs: learning, setup, ease of use, availability
    • Stress: convenience and hassle
  • Customer satisfaction index

Owners and funders requirements often reflect problems internally or externally:

  • Business direction and strategy
  • Profit margin:
    • Examine product lines and competition's products and services
    • Operational efficiencies start with the process, but usually involve the infrastructure components
  • The management component is assessed by owners in terms of planning, budgeting, scheduling, monitoring, and evaluating
  • Environmental issues in terms of political, social, demographic, and regulatory influences often involve customer, product, management, and workforce components

Management requirements are internal and specify desired operational performance:

  • Business objectives: key performance indicators
  • Quality: process, product, service
  • Cost: process, infrastructure, and workforce
  • Timeliness: process cycle time, responsiveness
  • Flexibility and modularity: process, product design, expertise
  • Capacity and idle resources: process, infrastructure

Workforce requirements are internally focused on the support components:

  • Empowerment: management component
  • Development: expertise component
  • Compensation: measures, appraisal, and rewards -- management component
  • Work environment: infrastructure and management
  • Security: management

5. EXPERT SYSTEM CONCEPTS

ES are computer programs created to apply domain knowledge to specific problem and decision situations. In this chapter, we will focus our attention on identifying and applying ES in situations where expertise and knowledge are required during the reengineering process. Before this, however, we must define what we mean by expertise. The characteristics of expertise include fast and accurate performance, usually in a narrow domain of knowledge. In addition, an expert can explain and justify the recommendation or result, as well as explain the reasoning process leading to the result. Further, experts quickly learn from experience, resulting in improved performance. Expertise implies the ability to solve unique and unusual cases -- often reasoning from basic principles or a model, or from a body of experience structured into cases or rules. Finally, experts often must reason under uncertainty and apply common-sense and general world knowledge to the situation.

In order to identify potential ES applications, it is useful to distinguish between the types of ES. Very often, one type of ES may be a much better choice depending on several factors --the situation particulars, degree of structure in the domain knowledge, the knowledge representation schema, and user characteristics. There are three general types of ES:

  • Case-based
  • Rule-based
  • Model-based


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