[Sigia-l] FW: Understanding Business Impacts of Web Systems Prototypes

[Eric Scheid]

We've talked about prototypes before, and we've talked about linking
requirement specifications, and we've talked about testing it with users ...
but have we talked about using prototypes as a means of testing how the
business processes or business models will be impacted?

The trinity model of IA has, after all, three parts: users, content, and
business. I'm guessing the content aspect is modelled/tested/prototyped
extensively during the usual IA process (ie. with card sorts, content
surveys, et al).

------ Forwarded Message

Understanding Business Impacts of Web Systems Prototypes
(David Lowe, Norazlin Yusop, Didar Zowghi)

Commercial Web developers typically make extensive use of prototypes early
in the development life cycle.

Rather than supporting requirements validation or elicitation, one of the
key objectives of this utilisation of prototypes is to support clients in
understanding how the system under development may impact upon their
business processes or even business models.

Despite this there has been little research into understanding the extent
and nature of clients interpretation of early prototypes and how they inform
them about potential business impacts. In this paper we report on a pilot
study aimed at identifying the key issues in this prototype exploration
process, and in particular what aspects of the relationship between
prototypes and business models should be considered further.

Key outcomes include a number of unexpected indicators, such as pointers
towards potential impacts that are not adequately addressed by current
prototype exploration, and differences in  the capabilities of clients
versus developers in understanding system impacts. We also describe key open
issues that need further investigation if we are to adequately understand
this aspect of the Web development process.

http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw03/papers/lowe/paper.html

------ End of Forwarded Message