Use Case Tree Method for Business Capabilities¶
Your enterprise embarked upon a strategic innovative journey towards establishing a full scale Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) in order to be able to:
- implement use cases that enable more foundational data quality for your enterprise’s business processes,
- be more easily compliant with regulations and
- enable strategic use cases that create a competitive advantage.
- To connect business silos to make them work together
- To create business agility by creating reusable business components
- To capture intellectual property and manage your business value
The key artifact in the development of an EKG is "the Use Case Tree":
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The Use Case Tree provides a long term data strategy and business capability plan.
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The Use Case Tree is the high-level requirements overview, scoping and dependency model.
It gives a mile wide, inch deep view of business capabilities.
Traditionally, data strategy, architecture and models i.e. specifications of business requirements on one side and technology and software, i.e. functionality on the other side, are separate. They are concerns of different departments; different groups of specialists think about these concepts in their own way and have their own practices and models for it. For any given development of a business capability that is supported by technology, different groups of people, often across many departments, will get involved and they all have their own way of looking at it. There is no shared language, not one single artifact that they can all talk to and reason about. The Use Case Tree is that single artifact. It provides one single construct, owned by the business, and primarily driven by business strategy, that every group of people, every specialist, can relate their way of thinking to. This includes not only data and technology specialists but also project managers, financial managers, security and compliance officers, operations engineers and so forth. All their models and different ways of looking at a given capability can be plugged into the Use Case Tree as different views.
Everything we ever do in an organization, especially in the data and technology pillars of that enterprise, should be related to at least one use case in the organization's Use Case Tree.
The Use Case Tree is a breakdown of strategic planned-for capabilities into smaller building blocks, all called use cases. Strategic long term use cases such as Enterprise Risk Management or Client 360 are down into smaller use cases that can---and should---be done first.
Each use case is a module---an EKG-component so you will---a building block with which other use cases can be constructed (see "Modularity Managed").
The Use Case Tree Method is a practice that has been developed and used for many EKG use cases that are running in production.
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Interoperability Achieved
Enable interoperability across the enterprise at high levels of maturity.
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Business Composability Improved
The Future of Business Is Composable
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Requirements Captured
Know exactly what the business---the customer or product owner---really needs, short-, mid- and long-term.
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Knowledge Captured
Enabling a whole new league of use cases.
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Gaps Bridged
Align business expectations with technology delivery.
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Expectations Managed
TODO: Summary
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Did not boil the ocean
Provide focus, clarity, deliver business value fast, do the right things at the right time. Save money.
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Disruption Avoided
TODO: Summary
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Quality Increased
TODO: Summary
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Aligned with Strategy
Align strategy of business capability improvement and execution.
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Delivered
TODO: Summary
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Modularity Managed
TODO: Summary
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Reuse Enabled
TODO: Summary