Red Sox Corporate Planners
—
Information Systems Planners / Consultants
|
| Contact: |
Ted Williams |
| Applications: |
'Architecture Tool'
for Systems Planning with Northern Telecom |
| Requirement: |
Red Sox was positioning
itself as the key to Northern Telecom addressing its mountain of a backlog
of systems that needed to be developed in short order to address its rapidly
changing business needs. To do so, it needed some systems to support its
systems design professionals so that they could get the most out of the
time they spent with their client's personnel for requirements analysis
and system definition. |
| Solution: |
To
meet their needs, Cherniak Software implemented SAL, the System Architect's
Lever.
SAL is a tool for creating and presenting demonstrations of information
systems. It is especially helpful for the purpose of evolving solutions
to match business situation requirements; it makes it easy to examine
and compare different solutions to the same requirements. SAL allows a
system architect to (among other things)
- demonstrate
a system (though some parts may exist only in part, or only in mock-up
form)
- demonstrate
the system with a set of `canned' demos each of which can be shown
as a `slide show'
- from start
to finish, each slide with its story, a part of the scenario
- by easily
jumping from one slide to some other (checkpoint) slide that might
be several steps forward in the demo, or even backward \- with
the choice of which slide to jump to being made by picking from
a list
- demonstrate
the system without manually entering any data during the demonstration
but by accepting data that had been prepared ahead of time (as if
it had been entered)
- switch back
and forth from interactive mode to canned mode \- yet still jump to
some milestone within a prepared demo as if there had been no data
entered interactively
- demonstrate
the system with different sets of data, some of which may be uploaded
from an external source.
- record notes
or comments or annotations in such a way that they can be recalled
by (a combination of) who made them, when they were made, which slide
/ part of the story they pertained to, what issue (or issues) the
comments are related to
- print a hardcopy
version of any demo / slide show (or any portion thereof)
- make changes
on the fly to the system being demonstrated, changes that will be
immediately reflected in the demonstration
- make changes
to data and have them reflected through any subset of slides
|
| Result: |
Experience has shown
that, with real-world systems, it is difficult to organize requirements
due to magnitude and complexity. SAL allows one to overcome this problem.
With the benefit of the System Architect's Lever, Red Sox was
able to produce more than expected in a shorter time frame with fewer
staff than anticipated. What's more, the product was lauded by
the people at Northern Telecom as an effective tool that allowed them
to get a better picture of what an eventual system would look like, and
as a catalyst in generating ideas as to how to build the most into a system.
|
| Platform: |
To fit Northern
Telecom's strategy, SAL was implemented on a platform new to Cherniak
Software and to Red Sox. Cherniak Software carried out the investigation,
the feasibility study, and the acquisition of the tools (the Visual Works
/ Smalltalk platform, an object-oriented GUI [graphical user interface]
platform developed by ParcPlace, the Xerox spinoff). Cherniak Software
developed a shell on top of the toolset to streamline its development,
and was successful in taking it from PC-compatible hardware to Macintosh.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Last
Updated: Tuesday, August 7, 2007
|
| |
