Process differentiation and information systems development

This paper presents the results of a study to determine if and how the use case model (UCM) could be used by strategists in small businesses. The reason for wanting to use the UCM in this way is to get problem domain experts, that is top management, more involved in systems development by creating a requirements model which can be used by systems developers as a starting point for analysis. The use of the UCM by developers and strategists should facilitate communication between the two parties. The application that was found for the UCM in strategy planning was to use it to generate ideas of how the organisation´s business processes could be differentiated. An idea generating technique, based on established idea generating techniques, was developed to do this. The results of testing the technique by experiment are presented. An attempt to measure the creativity of ideas that subjects generated was made in a similar way to how Getzels and Jackson measured creativity in their study of gifted children. The technique has also been tested during a series of case studies which were performed on small businesses. The results of part of one of the case studies are presented as are example of the technique.