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Abstract

Establishing or building a business information system is a very tedious process which not

only includes the application of modern information and telecommunication technologies but,

a good understanding of its application domain -the organization. These days object oriented

methods and languages are widely used in many business information systems development

methodologies.

However, many of these methods pins down its focus only to the representation of the objects

or entities of the BIS domain and the interaction between the BIS its domain through use

cases. In the development of BIS, most of the OO (Object Oriented) methods overlook the

other important components of the BIS domain such as the organizational culture, the

business ends, the business rules and even the job structure.

Business modelling would help the BIS strategists and designers to achieve or gain a more

comprehensive understanding of the problem, the business needs and the BIS objectives

which are essential to identify, analyse and specify the usersrequirements.

IMB is considered for the organisation approach and a case with upgrading the existing IBMLotus Notes R6.5 Version of Document Library management system to a complex Xpages

architecture using Lotus Notes R8.5. Entire requirements analysis is done against the

information system development over the current research.

This paper is written to focus on an object oriented model which would capture the main

components of an organizational system. This model is then used as a framework for

describing the object oriented method for business modelling in the context of BIS

development.

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1. Introduction

Business information systems (BIS) are software applications that deal with the problems

related to information supply for decisions making purpose in an organization. The BIS is

part of organizational system which is nothing but a human activity system designed to

perform a set of activities in order to achieve ends that have been previously defined. An

organizational system is a meaningful system. Its processes are carried out by actors to

achieve the predefined ends. The typical examples of BIS are management information

systems, online transaction processing systems, executive information systems and decision

support systems.

Developing a typical BIS system involves human, organisational and technical problems and

thus considered to be a complex issue. Existing BIS systems focuses only on technological

and human problems ignoring the organizational level problems.

Defining the required problem with unclear and unambiguous requirements is one of the

problems with humans. This problem has been addressed by object oriented movement to

BIS development. Most of these methods however focus mainly on the applications and

ignore the most essential elements of the organizational system in which BIS will operate.

A good understanding of the organizational system is a success factor for the process of

defining the requirements to be satisfied by BIS. So the business requirements can be defined

by simulating the organizational system before actually modelling application itself. A

business model for organization can help gain the comprehensive understanding of the

requirements (Fuenmayor, 1989).

Business modelling is a core process to many different areas viz. Business process

Reengineering, Organizational Development, Enterprise Modelling & Integration and

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informative system development. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a generic object

oriented business model that picks the main components of an organizational system up.

The model used here is objects oriented method for building specific business models of

organizational systems. UML-Unified Modelling Language is used for describing the

business model and for representing the entities, processes and events of an organizational

system through the application of the method (Avison, 1992).

The mail goal of this research is to evaluate and discuss the information system development

over IBM and it is assumed that a complex document library management system is

developed from an existing template and migrated over recent versions of reputed IBM

document management and workflow management tools Lotus Notes. A clear description of

the total software requirements and the proposed approach to develop the system is explained

in the below sections

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2. Organisational and Business requirement analysis over information system

development

As discussed over, the main goal of the current research is to analyse the typical information

system development or implementation model for a reputed organisation. Current research

and discussion mainly focused on upgrading a current information system and development

of migration techniques. IBM is considered as the case over the current research, where one

of the popular tools IBM Lotus Notes Database systems is evaluated against the information

system development for the key business requirements. Detailed evaluation and analysis of

the product considered and goals of the organisations over developing the respective

information system is discussed in detail over the below sections.

2.1 OO (Object Oriented business models against developing organisational systems)

An information system is an open system which is embedded into a wider system called

environment or application domain, the objective of which is to provide services to its

domain. BIS-a kind of information systems which provides the information their application

domains. These are referred as organizational systems.

An organizational system consists of set of activities or processes that are designed and

performed by a group of actors with the purpose of achieving a set of pre-defined ends.

Actors are described into a job structure for example departments, divisions, business units

etc. which defines the responsibilities for performing the processes. Each process requires

uses or involves a set of entities and one or more technologies. A process is triggered by an

event which may modify the state of the entities involved in the process (Wegscheider, 1997).

A process is regulated by business rules (e.g. laws, policies, norms and procedures) and the

respective flow of the modules over a typical organisational system is as shown in the below

figure

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Fig 2.1.1: Typical model of a business information system

2.1.1 Business process

A business process - a set of structured and hierarchical activities designed for reaching

organizational ends. Processes are of many different types: decision making, administrative,

production, and services, communication, and data management. Below figure represents the

general process that can be covered over the organisational information system development

F ig 2.1.1.1: General h ierar chy of business information development system

The organization of business processes into set of activities consists of several levels of

abstractions. There are three identified levels: Functions, Processes and tasks.as exemplified

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in figure 3.The main functions of the organizational system are at upper level. The functions

are divided into two or more processes, the process are into tasks. Each level is also divided

into sublevels (Flynn, 1992) and the typical decomposition of the business process over any

organisation is as shown below

F ig 2.1.1.2: Decomposition of business process over i nf ormation system development

2.1.2 Technologies

Technologies are used by business processes to perform their activities more efficiently and

effectively, where OOPs and databases are used to improve the performance of database

management systems. Similarly a production process that transforms raw materials into

finished products may apply many different technologies including chemical processes and

electromechanical equipment.

The application of scientific knowledge to real world problems is nothing but technology.

Most common types of technologies are Methods, techniques, models, devices, tools,

machines, software and hardware and below snapshot demonstrates various levels and types

of technologies

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F ig 2.1.2.1: Di ff erent levels and types of technologies

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2.1.3 Business En ti ties

What is entity? An entity can be anything known through it properties by a subject. Entities

can be of 2 types one that can perceived through senses and the second one could be the

physically felt. The physical entities are called as things. They have spatial, temporal and

causal properties.

F ig 2.1.3.1: Ontological representati on of var ious business enti ties against inf ormati on

system development

An organizational system involves, in many different ways, a rich set of entities. A business

entity is a concrete or abstract object that is relevant to the organizational system. Entities are

related to the execution of business processes. For instance, resources such as people, money,

raw materials, equipment, and data are kinds of entities that are required to carry out

processes. Clients and suppliers are also kinds of entities involved in most business processes

(Jacobson 1992).

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2.2 Organisational approach and requirement analysis of Information System

Development: A case with IBM Lotus Notes Database

2.2.1 IBM Lotus Notes brief

IBM Lotus Notes is a typical database, content management, document management and

workflow management system. Itsnot a typical relations database management system, but

the capability to organise and categorize the documents over the database and provides a

perfect indexing and view based architecture as well. Each and every artefact or object over

the Lotus notes database is referred as notes or document and the data is saved in the form of

documents. All the documents are saved over a main view of the respective database and they

are categorized over number of views based on the actual business requirements.

Lotus notes is a product developed for mailing the university project reports and started as an

academic research and later acquired by IBM and renamed as IBM Lotus notes and got the

respective licencing as well. It is par with Microsoft Outlook and communicator product,

where Lotus notes provides both the mailing and chatting options with Lotus SameTime tool.

Apart from the mailing and communication feature, IBM Lotus notes also provides document

and workflow management options, where it is being widely used by many small , medium

and large organisations.

Lotus notes tool is available both in the form of client and web, where are the client

applications are only restricted to a simple LAN or desktop kind of applications. Web

applications are similar to any type of the current web technologies and may features like

Java, AJAX, JavaScript and HTML5 are also embedded over the latest versions of IBM

Lotus notes web application development. Continuous research and development activities of

IBM has transformed the traditional information systems to sophisticated and rich user

interface web applications, where they are also successful in gaining number of clients and

users of the applications.

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IBM launches most recent versions of Lotus notes database and revolutionary changes are

observed ever since Java was embedded over the traditional coding options of Lotus like

Formula language and LotusScript. IBM Eclipse based user interface and programming

architecture over the Lotus Notes R7 has changed most of the traditional approached and it

was successful to deploy complex web and mobile applications as well with the current

release R9 of Lotus notes and a typical architecture of IBM Lotus notes database system and

Xpages architecture is as shown below

F ig 2.2.1.1: IBM Lotus Notes Xpages Architecture

Business goal of IBM is assumed to migrate or develop one of the existing document

management databases which are available as traditional notes template a sophisticated web

application with rich user interface using Xpages technology. Xpages are purely XML based

pages and has the embedded features of AJAX and JavaScript functionalities and can offer

wide range of customizations.

Migrating or development of the current information system includes many technical,migration and deployment issues and they were discussed in the later sections. Providing

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security to the Document Library Management System is another tedious job over the

development or migration process and the required security is provided with the ACL

constraints of typical IBM Lotus Notes Administrations and security settings and discussed as

below

3. Development/Migration of Document Library Management System: IBM Lotus

Notes Xpages Case

There are lot of issues to be considered while discussing the issues of developing an

information system in the organisational perspective and few of them are as discussed below

3.1 The relati onshi ps between an organizational system and its business information

System

The relation is shown in below diagram. The goal of BIS is to produce the information

needed by actors in an organizational system

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F ig 3.1.1: Relation among Organisational system and BI S

The business processes are performed by an actor requesting information from BIS.

Information is seminated by BIS by using a database that stores data about entities related to

organizational system. BIS is a model of the entities of an organizational system. Data objects

are used to represent the each relevant entity of the organizational systems which captures the

state and behaviour that the entity has in the organizational system at any given time. The

BIS uses the data generated by the business processed and the events that occur in the

organizational system or in it environment to update the database (Rumbaugh, 1991).

The relationship between the components of the organizational system and its BIS has been

determined in OO analysis methods. To model the processes, events and entities many OO

analysis and design methods have been identified. However there is a need consider the

system as a whole (holitstic or systemic) to indicate the relationship between the components

of organizational system. The method described in the next section identifies and models not

only the processes, events and entities of an organizational system, but its ends, job structure,

actors, technologies, and business rules which altogether confirm the system as a whole

(Martin, 1999).

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3.2 Business domain M odell ing

The generic business model used as an organizational design pattern for modelling the

domain of an information system is known as business modelling; here we out sketch the

structure of a method for object oriented business modelling. The basic requirement of this

method is the good understanding of the BIS organizational system is essential for a

comprehensive definition of its requirements.

One of the critical factors for developing BIS is the knowledge acquisition about the

organizational system. System modelling can be used to represent the organizational system

which captures its components and their inter relationships (Coleman, 1994).

3.3 Development of Document Library Management system

As clarified in the previous sections the main goal of this research is to evaluate and analyse

the key issues over developing the required information system for a reputed organisation.

IBM is chosen as the desired case, where developing or migrating one of the notes templatesDocument Library Management system to Xpages version. Following are the important

features and business requirements of the proposed information system

3.3.1 Feature of the proposed information system

Following are the important features of Document Library Management system

Library management system has the capability to store the historical documents

escalated over the organisations against key meetings and decision making process

Documents over the database are categorized based on status, author or date modified

Status of these documents over the database will be active, expired, accepted or

rejected and accurate workflow of documents over key organisational goals are

maintained over the database.

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User level access to the documents is also provided, where few of the employees of

the organisation have reader, editor, manager or administrator access against a

predefined ACL listed maintained over the database.

Above are the basic feature of the document library management database and this is

currently available as one of the notes templates of Lotus notes client environment and the

aim of the current information system development is to enhance the existing features and

migrate the notes database to Xpages based database using IBM Lotus notes R8.5 version.

Following are the key methodologies followed over the respective business information

system

3.3.2 Development issues whi le developing the proposed in formation system

Either development or migration of the existing document library management notes template

to advanced Xpages web application, following tasks are accomplished

Identifying as common user interface for all the forms, subforms, views, folders and

pages by using either CSS or XML pages

Migrating the entire LotusScript agents and script libraries to required java or

JavaScript based code snippets

Development of various reusable components and integration with the existing

documents using the view templates and form templates

Enhancing the security of the existing database by adding more user roles and access

level permissions

Deployment of the migrated database over the web application server

Thus all these issues are considered while developing the required business information

system for IBM client using Lotus notes R8.5 version. There are many technical and

migration issues involved over the current process and they can be explored over further

research.

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4. Conclusion

To conclude here that an object oriented business model captures the main the components of

BIS Domain. We believe that by modelling the BIS domain before modelling the BIS itself,

the modellers can get a more comprehensive knowledge of the problems that are present in

the organizational system, as well as a better understanding of users requirements. Our

business model helps to represent organizational systems from a comprehensive point of

view, in terms of all the components of the organizational system: ends, actors, processes,

technologies, entities, job structure, rules and events.

To evaluate the actual aim of the current research of development of business information

system, a case with IBM Lotus notes database is considered. Development of Document

Library Management system is considered, where the process includes migration of an

existing notes template to Xpages based sophisticated web application. Key features and

issues over the information system development or migration are discussed in the above

sections. From the entire analysis of the discussion it is clear that, development of a typical

business information system includes many technical, human and organisational aspects.

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References

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