Consultancy
Making sense of complexity by applying model based techniques
We can help you to improve your business information management
Improving business processes
Many organisations are adopting quality management as a core strategy. One of the principles defined in the related ISO 9001 standard is that results are improved “… when activities are understood and managed as interrelated processes that function as a coherent system.” Process modelling creates explicit representations of activities that can be analysed for improvement and subsequently used as a means of ensuring effective and efficient operations.
Refreshing standards and procedures
Standards and procedures in most organisations are still in the form of text documents, relying on human intuition for creation and interpretation. By creating models based on the existing documents they can be validated and updated in a much more systematic way. It’s very likely that this will uncover previously unknown gaps and errors that can be fixed inundated versions. It is also possible to automate parts of the authoring process, so that document sections can be generated directly from a model instead of being hand-written.
Management of business semantics
Building a system to handle data requires at least some understanding of its business semantics: the meaning of the data to the business. Pressures on timescales and budgets often result in this understanding being lost over time, and so the metadata (data about data) can no longer be used to align data over different business silos, resulting in decreased business control. Information modelling operates at a conceptual level, with the mapping to technology implementations being achieved by translating the source model to a logical or physical model. Following this process in reverse can help to reconstruct missing metadata to allow better alignment of information systems with business needs.
Restructuring data for Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence uses data to past, present, and predicted views of the state of a business. The databases that support day-to-day business operations are not usually suited to this kind of task, and so data is often restructured into a data warehouse or a data mart. In this form it can be used effectively for tasks such as interactive analysis, visualization, and data mining. Information modelling can simplify this process by making data structures and constraints fully explicit and visible.
Dashboards for process management
Management with the authority, responsibility and accountability for business activity can only exercise control if there is sufficient visibility of the relevant state of affairs. Highlighting current performance issues and historical trends can indicate resource constraints, inefficiencies, risk exposure, and other factors that require attention. Process modelling can provide a reliable framework to identify measurement points for Key Performance Indicators to inform management decisions.
… and more
Let us know how we can help you to improve your information systems. Contact us here.