Hi, Judy! I have a few (general and entirely personal) comments on this subject. First thing I'd say is: lucky you! Having had a bit of first-hand relevant experience, I'm a closet nut for business process analysis where once I might have yawned at it. Why? Well, the analogy is irresistible: BPA really is the interaction design of running a business. And like IxD, there's a lot of bad examples floating around.
I currently work for a government client that promotes the use of RUP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rup - that's your friend and mine IBM again), which is, for those of us who don't know by heart all of the silly acronyms that blight our current epoch, a long-established process framework for software development. What's great about RUP is that you can custom build your project processes out of a whole range of parts. What's not so great is that, unless you have years of savoir faire, how do you know you've selected the right parts? Nevertheless, the flexibility of RUP is usually preferable to the inflexibility of heavily prescriptive alternatives and it can comfortably work with other (often more stringently applied) management frameworks such as CMMI, ITIL and COBIT. Enough of the acronyms! ;-) Business process modelling is also very similar to use case modelling, as I discovered a few years ago when the new BPM, seen by some as a mountebank and by others an angel, came to each dept and asked us to "map our processes". At that time, BPA was that org's way of achieving the ISO9001:2000 quality standard. I used the super-expensive Triaster toolset to do the job (which is basically a big Visio plugin) and I felt very much at home with it! Accordingly the BPA and IxD roles are very much aligned and in my modest experience, out of everyone in a project team it's the relentless IxDer who will take the initiative and run with it. In the same way that the work of many IxDers often bleeds into ordinary business analysis. The BP Managers I've encountered tend to be ex Project Managers for whom PM wasn't sufficiently stretching. These folks can sometimes be a bit passionless, with the cold calculation of a hitman orthodontist ;-) On the other hand, the kind of professional *you* would have to be to occupy that *dual* role you mentioned is someone with a lot of curiosity and a near-dangerous interest in efficiency (that's many of us) but who doesn't have the blinkers for tech and interfaces (that narrows it down a little). When you succeed in doing your BPA effectively, and I'd put money on you doing it better than folks who have it in their job titles, it will considerably broaden your capabilities because the results you need to deliver will be considerably broader and longer term than those you typically get in pure IxD projects. Crucially, you'll usually get to see the fruits of your labour maturing live rather than in the form of stats etc, which is another cool aspect of BP. Lastly, another by-product is that you may also find yourself tasked in the future with other, apparently 'off-topic' tasks. Best wishes, Mike ------------------- www.mikepadgett.com ------------------- >We're on the verge of starting a new-ish project (some work done >already, but that's another issue). >The system is to be built using an SOA approach, which, it seems, >means that it will be be highly dependent on business process analysis >practices in order to define the Services. (In theory, there will be a >BPA and a UX person on the team...although we're both actually >interaction designers and will be covering both roles.) >Have you successfully integrated business process analysis practices >with interaction design practices? Have you worked on SOA projects as >an interaction designer, and if so, how did your role change? If so, >any advice or good references? (All I can find is a June 2007 IBM >paper "Integrate business modeling and interaction design".) > >tia, >Judy Stern >University of California, Berkeley > > >________________________________________________________________ >Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! >To post to this list ....... [email protected] >Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe >List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines >List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
