Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In order to determine the different levels of confidence for a specific business
process, during the phase of needs analysis presented in Figure 9.3 we propose to
use a three-step approach:
- determination of the confidence levels during the initial phase of user needs
definition;
- analysis of results of the field studies regarding the real use of applications;
- adaptation of the confidence levels, if necessary, and a return to the first stage.
The use of confidence level with the business processes used is not enough to
determine for sure whether a change in category needs to be carried out or not. In
fact it is also necessary to know the previous category of the user as well as the
activities that he was doing before using the new business process. This is carried
out via the use of a history of category changes for each user. In this history, each
process change is saved with the time of the change as well as the confidence level
associated with this change; and this for all four categories. For each category, it is
then possible to determine a global confidence level with the help of the following
formula:
By using this formula, the current category of the user is defined as being the
category that has the highest global confidence level.
C
OMMENT
9.1:‒ if the user selects a business process with a confidence level
equal to 1 for one of the categories, the category of the user is immediately changed
and the history of the category changes is reset.
One of the main problems that can occur with the use of this formula for the
determination of the global level of confidence resides in the fact that if we do not
fix a time limit on the level of information contained in the history, the system will
become decreasingly relevant to the level of detection of category changes. Thus, if
a user remains in the
Beaver
category
for an hour and he launches a new business
process linked with the
Peacock
category, the change in category can only occur a
certain time after this new process has been used, which can be quite long. This is
why we have fixed a limited lifespan for each piece of information stored in the
history of category changes. As determined by the sociological and anthropological
study conducted during the Viatic.Mobilité project [UST 09], a category change can
be considered as being almost sure after a maximum estimated length of around 7
minutes. This is this delay that we have taken as the maximum length of information
