People, Organizations, and the Other Columns | Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture


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	Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture By David C. Hay
	Table of Contents

	Chapter 5. Column Four: People and Organizations

People, Organizations, and the Other Columns

People and Data

A very important part of the documentation for a data model is identification of the roles (if not the individual people) who will be responsible for each entity and attribute. Certain people will "own" an entity, meaning that those people are ultimately responsible for its data quality. The same or other people are responsible for updating it. Yet others have permission to see it. This matrix is required if data quality is to be established.

Documentation of each entity should at least include identification of the role responsible for the quality of its information, if not the individual person so responsible.

People and Activities

All of the activity modeling techniques (except for the function hierarchy) described in Chapter 4 include references to the people or organizations performing the functions. Data-flow diagraming and process modeling were described in Chapter 4, because these techniques emphasize what is being done; use cases were described in this chapter because they are more concerned with the nature of the interaction. Indeed, all three of these techniques belong firmly in both columns.

In addition to their basic definitions in the models, all activities should also be classified as System One, Two, Three, Four, or Five activities.

People and Locations

Where people are significantly influences the way Systems One through Five described here work. Each person is in a particular location, and the roles each plays may be for different locations. It is incumbent on management of an organization to place the people who must communicate most extensively in the same location. The extent to which they are in disparate places will affect the quality and nature of the communications channels that can be built among them.

People and Timing

In the cybernetic model of the organization presented here, the main topic is communications, with no distinction being made between simple data and events. One event that was significant, however, was an operation's going outside its operating values (set points). Ultimately, this is the event that requires the management entity to act. With all the events that management must respond to from the outside world, this internal event is also critical.

The analysis project must clarify which events affect which parts of the organization.

People and Motivation

As stated previously, Chapter 8 contains a model of an organization's ends. It specifically deals with what it calls "elements of guidance" (business policies and business rules) that amplify management decisions, and "assessments" that provide a filtered view of the effect of the environment (there described as "influences") and operations on the organization's ends and means.

An element of guidance represents a message sent by management to its operating divisions. Business policies and business rules must be carefully designed to account for the issues described here.

Similarly, an assessment is the retrieval of information from the operating organizations, interpreting what happened , which influences caused it to happen, and the effects of these events on the enterprise's ends and means.

Business rules may be specific to the organization involved. There may be good and valid reasons for a rule to be applied to one division and not another. This must be documented.


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