The Usi4Biz Platform

The Usi4Biz platform is part of the Usi4Biz Framework and it was created to support the methodology of Business-User Alignment. It was developed on the Java platform in the context of a PhD research at the Université catholique de Louvain. Its main goal is to assist business analysts associating business processes activities with user interfaces that are used to perform these activities, and also make end-users aware of which activities of the business process they are performing when using a specific user interface.

The basis of this approach is a network of links from business process models, imported from existing modeling tools, until final user interfaces, independent of the technology in which they were developed. The benefits of this approach impacts not only IT stakeholders, but end-users and business analysts by:

• concretely representing how activities are performed through organization’s systems;
• showing the impact of business modifications on the way users are going to operate systems;
• keeping the end-users aware of which part of the process is being executed when interacting with a specific user interface;
• allowing end-users to report bottlenecks and suggestions of improvement in user interfaces that cannot be detected by monitoring tools; and
• providing analytical data that supports the analysis of users, user interfaces and business processes, enabling fast adaptation to the business dynamics.

Instead of using existing IT approaches, such as SOA, to manage processes and its technological implementation, we are focusing on people who are the ones who effectively perform the processes though systems. These systems are considered, mainly their user interfaces, but agile methodologies have been showing that giving more attention to people, systems become naturally more adapted to their work, independent of the applied technology.