DATA STREAM SOLUTIONS -- tools for network documentation and information management : netViz

The defining characteristics of a business reflect its relationships - with customers, personnel, manufacturing facilities, government regulators and so on.In Sweden, Kraftnätet (translated "Powernet"), is a full-service business

consulting group that

specializes in modeling a business's relationships and processes so that all of the key players can better understand the current organization and more intelligently plan for the future. And netViz is the tool of choice for Kraftnätet consultants.

According to Goran Ostrom, a principal and founder of Kraftnatet, "we use a methodology we've developed called 'Method Base Alfa.' It's more comprehensive than what people traditionally think of as business process re-engineering. For example, we'll usually work very closely with an organization's employees and we focus on all of a company's 'stakeholders,' which often includes customers. From this, we analyze the requirements of all of the interested parties and see how those interests shape the company's processes, organization, information flow and technical environment. Once we have the raw information, we map out the processes and their relationships in a way that's easy to understand. Our clients include Volvo, Telia, a Swedish telecommunications company with over 30,000 employees and SEB, a large Swedish Bank, so the size and complexity of these relationship models can be staggering."

"We realized early on that we needed something more than just a drawing tool to display our models," said Ostrom.

"We are most interested in process relationships, so we needed something that could easily and intuitively handle inter-process links. Also, we needed to be able to make changes on the fly and have them reflected wherever appropriate throughout a complex system. Generic drawing packages like Visio were too cumbersome to accommodate frequent modifications in our models. Once we found netViz , we immediately standardized on it. It's the perfect complement to Method Base Alfa. Our method describes a company's processes and relationships in the context of all of its interested parties. Using netViz we can control the look of every object, embed each object with business data and graphically depict all of its relationships with other processes or stakeholders throughout the system."

Ostrom also chose netViz because of its usefulness as a brainstorming tool. "We can sit down with a client to talk about his or her business-process structure and create a hierarchical, inter-linked netViz model as we talk. We're able to change the model to document our thoughts and show the client what approach we might recommend to address his or her particular needs. We can create, modify and sketch out a high-level project while we're meeting with the company's decision makers. After the discussion we can leave a copy of the model and take a copy to work on. Compared to conventional drawing packages, netViz takes half the time to build complex process models and provides a lot more information. In one of our jobs with Volvo, we created an entire company infrastructure and visualized it in netViz with the help of Volvo personnel. Once the netViz model was completed, it formed the blueprint for implementation."

Of course, a process model is only useful if a company's employees have access to it. Kraftnätet recognizes that, and uses netViz's Web-publishing ability to distribute the models it creates. Says Ostrom, "once we've agreed on a final documentation set, we publish the entire netViz project to our customer's intranet. This allows all of the employees with access to see the entire hierarchical, inter-linked model from a Web browser. If the client decides to make changes to the model, the modification only needs to be made once; it will automatically be reflected the next time the site is accessed."

"Our goal is to help clients understand their business and make intelligent decisions about how their internal structure can be changed, says Ostrom. "The combination of netViz and Method Base Alfa makes the difference. With netViz we can quickly display and model complex business data and relationships. Our method gives us the language to describe the whole company in a structured way. From a single netViz documentation set, our customers can provide employee training, speed up the change-management process and get control of a complex interconnected system of business processes."

A business-consulting firm with offices in Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden, Kraftnätet performs services for clients throughout Europe. You can contact Goran Ostrom at goran.ostrom@kraftnatet.a.se, or Anders Persson at anders.persson@kraftnatet.com gordan.ostrom@kraftnatet.com.

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