Model-based design of tools for business understanding and re-engineering

Tools can provide useful assistance for business re-engineering planning. Activities such as business knowledge acquisition, business process modeling, performance, quality and impact analysis can all be done more effectively if supported by proper tools. In this paper, we describe a design scenario for business understanding and re-engineering tools that is based on the systematic modeling of business knowledge. The business knowledge model forms a conceptual schema for the tool repository. We start by building a generic business model. As both the model and required tool characteristics vary from company to company and from one business re-engineering project to another, we customize the generic model and tools to reflect needs of a given company and a business re-engineering project in hand. We achieve a required level of tool flexibility by applying meta-CASE techniques. The physical repository schema and tools themselves are automatically generated from the customized business model specifications. In this paper, we focus on tools and analysis methods that have not been extensively described in other sources. We describe an interview assistant tool, support for impact analysis, and an end-user query language in which a user can define new business analysis methods that are not supported by a generic tool environment.