Our approach is a result of the experiences at Finansbank and the conducted literature studies. We have concluded that several philosophies of several methodologies can be used to construct a new approach, especially in organizations where the organization structure changes constantly such as Finansbank.
Conventional methods provide us a guideline through the design phase. However, when the organization and the way of communication changes rapidly within an organization, finding another way to design and implement an IS becomes crucial. We saw that applying conventional methods have caused loss in information during the design because of the changing organization structure and the communication channels. A new framework supporting this type of organizations became necessary.
Our approach is based on becoming the user so that the essential information elements can be extracted and the boundaries of the Universe of Discourse can be well defined during the definition of processes. Because of the changing communication channels, stakeholders’ and the user’ perspectives were changing also. The best way to cover this aspect is to act like a stakeholder (for decision making and implementations) and to act like a user (for understanding the business flows). Of course, our aim is not to interfere with the users’ and stakeholders’ duties, but rather becoming them, in order to ‘understand’ and ‘comprehend’ their decisions and creating the ‘common understanding’ concept. The reason why we are pushing on this concept is that, users and stakeholders perceive the world differently. Even between the stakeholders. Since they always tend to ‘understand’ those aspects, which are of their own benefit. This ideas and approaches have been verified with different literature studies also.
Another point is that, we don’t see the domain to be automated as a problem area, but rather as a trouble area. This view has given us the opportunity to see the business processes and the information flows from a different perspective.
As it can be seen from the business processes (as from the current situations and future simulations) that the working flows have been reduced dramatically. In fact, those processes still exist, but exist now in the system flows. There has been a shift from the business to system flow.
In order to formalize the way of working of our approach, the framework definition of Henk Sol is used [see reference Dah97]. Although this gives some guidelines in how we can work, this may / can change per organization. The main issue here is to find a way adaptable for the organization and seeking for representation methods that are known to that organization and using them. Forcing the organization to use methods not known by them will cause rejection within the organization, since they are not willing to learn something not familiar.
We have tested our approach with a real life project where all the aspects of project management (from planning to budgets) have been covered but due to the time restriction, not mentioned within this thesis.
We were able to increase the working-efficiency, QoS and improve the Marketing strategy (see previous sections). In ours and the organizations’ view, we have succeeded in delivering a project that is currently used by more than hundred users worldwide and responsible for the Front and Back-office activities, CRM, Document Management and the integration with the Bank-System of Finansbank (Holland) NV.