Business Studio Portal and HTML Publication

Once the management model has been generated and the regulatory documents have been approved, consultants and/or specialists of the company are faced with the task of disseminating this information among company stakeholders and employees, since even the most optimal business processes cannot function properly if employees are not aware of the regulations affecting their implementation. When addressing this problem, specialists have to consider the following:

• Since the number of documents can be very large and due to the fact that any document needs regular updating, it makes little sense to make and distribute the documents in hard copy. Even small companies may have up to 200 regulatory documents;
• Documents distributed in the Microsoft Word format are difficult to analyze, and large numbers of documents make the task of finding particular information even more difficult.

Business Studio offers user-friendly options for solving these problems using either Business Studio Portal or HTML Publication.

Business Studio Portal

Business Studio Portal is a web portal which enables medium to large organizations to build a company knowledge base, collect measure values, and receive employee feedback. Employees can access the company’s knowledge base from any device anywhere in the world. Business Studio Portal supports a separation mechanism: employees must log in to work on Portal, and then only get access to the information which concerns them.

After successful authorization, employees are taken directly to their Personal Page. It contains all the necessary links for quick transition to the information and documents used by the employee: Job Descriptions, Department Descriptions, etc. The links on the Personal Page can be customized to suit the needs of the company, and employees can create their own Favorites section.

The Activity Model section allows employees to work with documents and reports posted on Portal. The reports carry information on the elements of the business model. Hyperlinks are used for quick and easy movement between documents. However, employees see only those hyperlinks that they are authorized to use.

Any document or report posted on Portal can be:

• Opened and saved in Microsoft Word (DOCX) or Portable Document Format (PDF);
• Emailed to another Portal user by sending a link;
• Placed in the Favorites section on an employee’s Personal Page;
• Printed out.

Aside from providing the necessary information, Portal captures statistics on the number of page visits and enables employees to rate how useful any document is. This allows business analysts to assess website traffic and the quality of information posted on Portal.

Portal supports full-text search, which helps users quickly search for the information they need.

Portal allows the search conditions to be preset by the user as follows:

• Location of the search (everywhere, in a given document or in element names);
• Search match parameters;
• Repositories in which the search is to be carried out.

Users can only access information which corresponds to their authorization status in the search results.

As well as providing an efficient and user-friendly regulatory documentation distribution system, Business Studio Portal offers a range of additional features:

• Collect and discuss employee suggestions;
• Coordinate changes to the business processes and familiarize employees with the new versions of the documents in their areas of interest;
• Collect measure values and monitor strategy implementation.

Collect and discuss employee suggestions

Involving employees in improving the company is the key to its successful development: after all, it is the employees who see the imperfections and irrationalities of the business processes in their activities. Giving employees the opportunity to voice their comments and suggestions makes their work more meaningful and fosters a sense of involvement. At the same time, the company receives information that can be analyzed and put to good use.

Business Studio Portal allows all employees to take part in discussions of the company’s business processes: Employees can make comments and suggestions on the pages with business process descriptions. Messages are immediately forwarded to the business process owner and the business analyst responsible for the process. After evaluation employee suggestions can be used to make changes to the business architecture of the company.

Coordinate changes to the business processes and familiarize employees with the new versions of the documents in their areas of interest

Business Studio Portal enables surveys of employee opinion to be carried out where agreement is needed on planned changes.

Once changes to the company’s business architecture are agreed upon and transferred to the model, the company begins operating under its new conditions. Business Studio Portal notifies the relevant company employees of any changes made to objects in their areas of interest. Employees shall familiarize themselves with the new versions and confirm the receipt of information in the Survey section of Portal.

Portal records the time of message receipt and allows managers to check whether all employees have familiarized themselves with the changes.

Collect measure values and monitor strategy implementation

Portal allows plan and actual measure values to be entered into the Business Studio database in an Internet browser. The entered data will be immediately available on Portal for checking and analysis by the responsible employees.

These employees can monitor the current status of each of the company’s measures using the Status color-coding. It glows green when the measure is operating within its specified limiting values, yellow when its values enter the so-called alarm zone, and red when the measures fall into the critical zone. The position of any measure value relative to its upper and lower limits can also be viewed. Additional data is given by the so-called “trend” of the measure, an increase or decrease in its value compared to that recorded in the previous measurement period.

Calculated measures can be decomposed to the lowest levels to discover which measure is responsible for the deviation. Portal also enables users to view the dynamics of measure changes.

Objective achievement is monitored in a similar way. Objective assessments are calculated automatically based on the measure values related with the given objective. Achievement of all objectives can be analyzed using the strategy map.

Demo Version of Business Studio Portal

HTML Publication

HTML Publication is a website for project teams and small organizations that makes models and regulations accessible to all the stakeholders and employees of the company. An HTML Publication can be viewed at any workstation with access to a standard web browser.

HTML Publication is a static website automatically created by Business Studio. On opening an HTML Publication using a standard browser, a tree with the relevant Business Studio sections (Activities, Org units, Functional objects, etc.) is displayed. Each element of the tree corresponds to one or several reports marked for HTML Publication. If, for example, a process is selected, the Process Brief report will be opened by default; other reports for this process (for example, Process Description) can be displayed by selecting an item from the drop-down list.

HTML Publication enables users to navigate between documents and carry out a full-text search. Each system object in the HTML Explorer is represented by a hyperlink, including external files attached to Business Studio objects (for example, document forms in the Microsoft Word format). This provides a fast and efficient means of working with information.

Business Studio allows users to create HTML Publications with set volumes of information: documentation relating to a specific process, regulatory documentation governing departments and management reports.

HTML Publication can be used to:

• Create publications on internal or external web portals for quick and easy access by all employees;
• Transfer information to external specialists (as a file);
• Conduct presentations.

Example of Online HTML Publication