Business processes have become more complex, more interconnected, interdependent, and interrelated than ever before. Businesses create complex communities with strategic suppliers, outsourcing vendors, networks of customers, partnerships and regulatory entities. Organizations have to address the pressure of change, cost cutting, global competition, time-to-market compression, changing technologies, and increasing complexity. Therefore, Software projects that implement these business systems are very complex. The ability to really understand the complexity of the business has become a key success factor to manage the complexity of software projects.
Businesses are getting more and more aware of the need of formal and clear models to drive IT projects. Models at the level of the business and IT software will provide both business people as IT engineers a common base for clear understanding of the as-is and to-be. This unambiguous understanding will enable the management of the transition. The complexity requires models that are understandable, provide necessary abstraction and contain enough detail to really represent this complexity in all its details. The value of the model increases with the level of detail it contains (business rules, constraints, multiplicities). Businesses that do not invest in understanding and representing their own business and applications, will eventually be the victim of their complexity. These models need to be centralized in a repository, and use a visual formal common notation (UML). To support efficient co-evolution of business and IT applications, the models need to be traceable from business level to design. Especially businesses that develop software offshore have to communicate the complexity of their business by using models of high quality.
Modeling is a new profession, requiring high educated people with strong mathematical background. The importance of this profession is growing rapidly, and businesses that take proper advantage of this new profession, will have a differentiator in quality and cost efficiency.
NEES Consulting is a Center of Expertise providing best of breed analysis and design services, at fair cost. Rather than just selling people, we want to provide our customers with high quality, really usable models and documents that provide value for our customers at short and long term.