Excavating for Information

In the early stages of the project, several face-to-face meetings were conducted with the Premier management and staff in the MPD ( Marketing/Product Development ), Sales, and Technology solutions Departments. During those sessions we had the opportunity to further understand Premier's business model, their product-line growth pattern through previous years, and Premier's overal future vision.

We were not really interested in the detailed specs of each product, in fact our goal was to understand the growth and relationship patterns of Premier's products or services. This was also a good self discovery process for the stakeholders and the company in general to play corporate anthropologists and view themselves from an outsider's point of view.

Using the gathered information, we managed to develop a Data Model and Work Flow diagram that better represented Premier's business model. This was an essential part of our project.

A company's data model is the DNA of that business; getting it wrong during the system analysis process, results into a software that is useless.

We also figured that what Premier really needed was a solid, easy to use Content Management System (CMS), where multiple people could maintain the integrity of the content in a collaborative fashion.