This scenario describes how a business analyst at a fictitious company develops a solution with IBM® ECM Widgets.
About this task
The owner of several car dealerships hires a business analyst to improve the efficiency of her dealerships. The business analyst identifies several inefficiencies in the current processes, including the loan application process.
The current loan application process, customers fill out paper applications and the accounting staff passes the hardcopy applications around the office for approvals. The business analyst notices several pitfalls that are associated with the current process:
- The hardcopy application is difficult to update.
- The hardcopy application can be misplaced or left in an inbox.
- The accounting staff does not always know who has the application.
- The work cannot be easily distributed to employees.
The business analyst wants to use IBM ECM Widgets to create a Web-based application to that improves efficiency and customer satisfaction.
To create an application that will enable the accounting staff to process loan applications more effectively, the business analyst defines the infrastructure for the loan application process, which includes the following tools and tasks:
- Define the steps in the workflow (Process Designer)
The business analyst identifies each step that must be completed to process a loan application.
- Develop the user interface (mashup environment and IBM ECM Widgets)
- Organize the components of the interface by creating spaces and pages.
The business analyst identifies the groups of users who must have access to the loan processing application and creates spaces for each group of users. Then, the business analyst identifies the tasks that each user must complete and creates pages for each task.
For example, some members of the accounting staff are responsible only for creating loan applications while other users must review loans. However, managers need to oversee all loan applications and track each employee's workload.
- Embed and wire widgets in the pages.
The business analyst identifies the widgets that enable the users to complete their tasks efficiently and embeds the widgets in the pages. For widgets that are not automatically wired to each other, the business analyst specifies how the widgets communicate with each other.
- Share the user interface (mashup environment)
The business analyst specifies which users have access to specific spaces and pages.
- Deploy the user interface (mashup environment)
The business analyst deploys the application to the production server.
Remember: The widgets that are used to create an application can come from multiple sources, such as IBM ECM Widgets, the mashup environment, or a third-party vendor. Most of the widgets that are provided with IBM ECM Widgets are automatically wired. However, you must manually wire widgets that are provided by another application.
The following topics show examples of some of the work that the business analyst must complete to deploy an application for processing loan applications to the employees at a car dealership.
Note: This example assumes that the business analyst has already defined the loan application processing workflows, and does not provide additional information about the design or creation of the workflows.