A point in time field supports a business need for an information system to know when an event took place (or will take place). Date, Time, and Date/Time field values represent a quantity of time involving a specific unit of measure and precision. Like other quantity values, they can participate in calculations (E.g. subtracting one date from another to determine the number of days in-between).
The right approaches and tools can help business analysts perform the appropriate evaluation to help businesses improve operations, revenue, and decision-making. What are the common methods business analysts use to evaluate organizations? How do the SWOT and PESTLE methods work? What approach works best for analyzing a firm’s mission and objectives? Are there methods that can analyze how the environment can impact a business? This article explores the various methods business or data analysts use to evaluate enterprises and discusses how each method works as a business analysis tool.
A classification field allows the recording of a meaningful fact about a record instance, with that fact drawn from a pre-established set of values. Online access to values applicable to a given instance might be through a drop-down or pop-up list, or as labelled check boxes or radio buttons. The organization may be interested in just the values, or there may be additional information about each value that the system needs to manage.
Business Analysts solve problems, but ultimately these solutions are meant to serve people, and it takes people to create the definition for these solutions. With that said, no matter how great an analyst is at discovery, analysis and solutioning, key soft skills are essential to being a best-in-class business analyst.
Soft skills are the people-side of business and really any type of engagement. There is a large variety of skills included in the soft skills category depending on which resource you read. But there are two that always seem to land in the top five..
Having discussed fields intended to name record instances, we move on to fields intended to satisfy the need to say something quantitative about a record. A quantity field requires particular attention be paid to its unit of measure (UoM) and precision.
Sometimes the best solutions are right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Get in the habit of working from first principles and you’ll find it easier to cut through preconceptions to change the business question and quickly see alternatives that you may have missed.
The objective of this article is to help business analysts capture functional requirements for an information system as User Stories. It discusses four levels of story. The first two levels represent business context. Levels three and four involve functional detail needed by developers and testers to deliver stories at those levels.
In this article we focus on record name fields. These fields are intended to contain a user-recognizable value by which a person or thing is known, addressed, or referred to. Unlike a record business identifier field, a name field’s value may change over time. Also, there are ‘real world’ names for things (e.g. people, cities) for which valid duplicate values can exist.
We hear the buzzword “business transformation” everywhere. It has become almost expected of any organization to announce they are on their digital transformation journey. What does it mean?
There are many definitions of digital transformation. This abundance points to a broad interpretation of the term. The ambiguity of these statements reflects vague expectations of many organizations embarking on their “digital transformation journeys”.
Having explored information system record concepts, the objective of this article is to examine one particular type of field — the record business identifier. Its purpose is to uniquely identify an instance of a record. Users of an information system are expected to have knowledge of, or access to, this value. The value is used to start down, or stay on, the ‘happy path’ of any business process that deals with the specific record instance it identifies.
When engaging on projects we need to lead our clients to get the outcomes we need for analysis. If we act passively and don’t take charge then they’ll take things all over the place and create chaos. In this article we’ll explore how a problem statement acts as a powerful tool to keep control of our engagement and analysis right through the project lifecycle.
Taking a product from an abstract idea to an item that’s widely available in the marketplace demands a hands-on approach to prevent things from falling through the cracks. A technique that goes back nearly a century, product lifecycle management (PLM) has for decades been used to improve the efficiency of product development and design.
In recent years, however, a growing number of organizations are realizing the capability of cloud-based PLM software to drive fulfillment benefits. There is a recognition that you can strengthen your supply chain management by deploying PLM from product conception to multi-faceted fulfillment. As your product approaches maturity, it necessitates changes to workflow, supply chain, and fulfillment processes as a means of attaining sales objectives and driving overall business strategy.
But before we get into that and how PLM affects fulfillment, first a definition of PLM.
This article discusses record types supporting the concepts product, customer, sale, and location. The names given to these records varies depending on the line(s) of business an organization is in and, in particular, the organization’s sales processes.
This series is about understanding data fundamentals applicable to information systems. In this article and the next, record types specific to an organization’s line(s) of business are discussed. These records support maintaining data for an organization’s Products, Customers, Sales, and sale-related Locations. They will be viewed within the context of five generic line of business functions that represent the business processes involving any product as it goes through its lifecycle.
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