Analysis and design Building an e-business

608 Part 3 Implementation Analysis for e-business is concerned with understanding the business and user require- ments for a new system. Typical analysis activity can be broken down into: understanding the current process and then reviewing possible alternatives for implementing the e-business solution. In the following sections we will review different techniques that enable us to sum- marize the operation of current processes and proposed e-business processes. In this section we focus on using diagrams to demonstrate the business processes. User requirements cap- ture techniques that help determine the function required by a system are described in the Focus on user-centred site design section. Analysis for e-business Analysis for e-business Using analytical tech- niques to capture and summarize business and user requirements. We’re not Sainsbury’s and don’t have a shop to present our offering from, so creating awareness through Facebook is an obvious thing to do. We get something like 15 of our traffic through Facebook. It might not be the best converting traffic but it’s important for spreading our brand. It was also easy for us to put together – it took us a week to get the functionality going and perhaps another five days of tweaking. Going forward, would you consider developing a multi-channel presence? We know from our competitors’ experience that offline for this product doesn’t work as well in terms of margins. You can, of course, sell flowers offline because there are high street florists. But it is much more profitable for us to refine our proposition rather than expand into offline. Direct marketing for offline alone is very expensive and the conversion rate is terrible. It just doesn’t warrant it. Have you thought about developing your e-commerce platform into a side-business? It has occurred to us. The Prestat partnership has been very successful and we know we could do another one of those. We have built both a great technology solution and a highly efficient operational platform meaning we can offer a full blown solution to third parties if we wish to. The question is where is our time best spent – creating value in the Arena brand or white labelling what we’ve done to date? Or both? What about launching other sites? There is a lot to be gained by improving our core offering – we know a lot about flowers and we are very good at them. But we may expand the Arena brand. We own various other Arena domains but we are in no rush to push them until we feel that we have really delivered the best possible service for UK flower lovers. Things like expanding our offering for business customers, where we’ve already developed Arena For Business, a unique set of tools to save business time and increase accountability. Pushing that side of the business will be important for us, as well as other areas like weddings, which is a huge market in the UK and often not that well served. We have watched similar companies to ours expand their offering and it can look a bit tacked on and un-thought-through. It makes one wonder if they’re doing it because they can’t make enough out of the core flower business and are scrabbling around for other ways to generate revenue. For us, the core flower business has to be robust and standalone, with no propping up from other categories. Thereafter, we can take our time to work out what we want to do next. Source: www.econsultancy.comnews-blognewsletter3722arena-flowers-8217-sam-barton-on-web-design- and-development.html 609

Chapter 11 Analysis and design

Analysts recognize that delivering quality information to employees and partners, or exchanging it between processes, is the key to building information systems that improve efficiency and customer service. Pant and Ravichandran 2001 say: Information is an agent of coordination and control and serves as a glue that holds together organisations, franchises, supply chains and distribution channels. Along with material and other resource flows, information flows must also be handled effectively in any organisation. This shows that in the era of e-business analysis should be used as a tool to optimize the flow of information both inside and outside organizations. In this chapter we start by looking at how workflow management is a key to managing time-based information flows. We then review how process modelling is used to analyse information flows to optimize business processes and then look at information storage analysis through a brief review of data modelling. Workflow management Analysing and revising an organization’s workflow as part of workflow management WFM is a concept that is integral to many e-business applications, so before we look at process analysis techniques, let us look at why workflow is integral to e-business. WFM was defined by the Workflow Management Coalition WfMC, 1996 as the automation of a business process, in whole or part during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. Workflow systems automate e-business processes by providing a structured framework to support a process. Applications of workflow in e-business include actioning queries from external customer queries or internal support queries. These queries may arrive by e-mail, phone or letter. E-mail enquiries can be analysed and routed to the right person depending on their subject. Letters may need to be scanned before being added to the workflow queue. Workflow helps manage business processes by ensuring that tasks are prioritized to be performed: ➝ as soon as possible ➝ by the right people ➝ in the right order. The workflow approach gives a consistent, uniform approach for improved efficiency and better customer service. Workflow software provides functions to: assign tasks to people remind people about their tasks which are part of a workflow queue allow collaboration between people sharing tasks retrieve information needed to complete the task such as a customer’s personal details provide an overview for managers of the status of each task and the team’s performance. What type of workflow applications will exist in a company? For a B2B company, e-business applications of workflow might include: 1 Administrative workflow. This concerns internal administrative tasks. Examples include managing purchase orders for procurement and booking holidays and training. 2 Production workflows. These are customer-facing or supplier-facing workflows. An intranet- or extranet-based customer support database and stock management system integrated with a supplier’s system is an example of production workflow. Workflow management WFM The automation of information flows and provides tools for processing the information according to a set of procedural rules. 610 Part 3 Implementation Activity-based process definition methods Analysis tools used to identify the relationship between tasks within a business process. Process Part of a system that has a clearly defined purpose or objective and clearly defined inputs and outputs. Traditional approaches to process analysis use established systems analysis and design meth- ods that are part of methodologies such as Structured Systems Analysis and Design