Architecting Portal Solutions: Applications Development

4.2 Plan

As in Chapter 3, we will concentrate on the three major tasks that make up the Execute phase. To summarize the envisioned goal and vision for IFB, we have captured its business and IT requirements. As always, we must be sure to understand where the customer is today, what it needs to accomplish within the scope of the current project, and its long-term business goals.

4.2.1 Business requirements

The most important features for IFB include:

• Empower employees and teams to be more productive:

  • Increase employee retention, decrease turnover, and improve HR business processes by automating corporate and store management HR transactions through Employee Self Service

  • Provide every associate with personal access to relevant information about benefits, policies, and procedures and to perform day-to-day HR functions via the Web from the store or home

  • Leverage standard HR applications like PeopleSoft or integrate into legacy applications

  • Create a shared, centralized HR service environment

  • Help them communicate effectively with one another and work together on tasks

• More streamlined and effective inventory processes:

  • Better tracking of inventory and losses

  • Enabling just-in-time inventory to reduce stocking and spoilage

  • Effective integration with suppliers

• Optimize task execution and management

  • Set up just-in-time teams appropriate for tasks

  • Provide corporate-wide standardizations through task templates

  • Track and improve task execution

4.2.2 IT requirements

From an IT perspective, the most important considerations include:

• Ensure security by role and ease of access to different systems

• Integration with existing back-end systems, including HR, inventory, and supply chain

• Personalized content delivered by role and device type

• Manageability of the system through regional IT centers for back-office applications and global applications for teamwork and collaborations