Service Elicitation Method Using Applied Qualitative Research Procedures - Advanced Design Approaches to Emerging Software Systems - page 11

Figure 3. Order to Cash composite business process

candidates. All of the codes under the “Function”
core categories are service candidates and are
given a descriptive name using the categories they
represent and to which they are related.
With the help of the business process analysis,
the service candidates can be prioritized based
on how often they are mentioned in the business
process descriptions. In our case study, we simply
sorted the services into two classes: local and
global service candidates. A service candidate is
global if it belongs to any category identified from
more than one business process and should be thus
reusable in other projects, as well. Otherwise, the
candidate is local and is not likely to be reused
in other projects.

“Order-to-Cash” process, giving a more extensive
view to the enterprise and providing a conceptual
skeleton of the categories to be enhanced with the
use case analysis.
The analysis of a typical “Order-to-Cash”
composite business process reveals concepts such
as customer, product, sales order, service order,
field service, installed base, pricing, payment,
billing account and so on. The example “Order-
to-Cash” composite business process is outlined
in Figure 3 and one of the processes is detailed in
Figure 4. In our example, the conceptual analy-
sis of the business processes produce the codes
listed in Figure 3. Sources of the codes identified
from the “Order Entry” process are underlined in
Figure 4. The conceptual analysis of all business
process descriptions provides the skeleton of the
categories as presented in Figure 5 (The number
of occurrences is provided in the brackets).
An example product in this project could be,
for example, an ADSL connection, and thus, the
business use case “Order Entry for ADSL Product”
would be implemented in the project. The details
of the example use case are presented in Table 3
with identified codes and categories. The codes
and categories identified from the use case
analysis are appended to the hierarchy as pre-

EXAMPLE

As an example, we use an imaginary “Order-to-
Cash” composite business process and a project
implementing an IT system to support the “Or-
der Entry” business process in a contact center.
The “Order Entry” process is merely one stage
within the “Order-to-Cash” composite process,
and thus, the use case analysis of the project will
cover only this stage. However, the scope of the
business process analysis can cover the whole