SCIPIO Method

New ways of doing business, and new ways of improving business processes, demand new ways of analysing IT strategy and IT requirements, and these lead naturally to component-based solutions.

SCIPIO is the leading method linking business requirements with component- based development and legacy reuse. SCIPIO brings together, for the first time, the disciplines and best practices of business process modelling, workflow management and object-oriented analysis and design. It uses these to enable developers to create flexible systems from reusable components. It establishes capability freely across open distributed technology. The result is information systems capability for business users beyond the Millennium.

• Business process orientation - design of business processes to support business relationships and interactions with customers and other business partners.
• Technology-free modelling of business processes - use of consistent concepts and principles for business design and technological design.
• Maximum reuse of existing assets - creation of flexible software components by wrapping legacy code wherever possible.
• Flexibility based on components - design of software applications as a series of components, linked together by flexible middleware, assembly tools or workflow engines.
• Evolution in stages - organic evolution and implementation of solutions, in small but coherent steps.

• Value-for-money for business from IT.
• Business process improvement through IT.
• IT stimulating business advantage.
• Investment protection for IT assets.
• IT enhances business capability and flexibility.
• Reduce the business risk of IT - and the IT risk of business.

SCIPIO draws on a number of previous methods, including: Information Engineering (JMA and Texas Instruments), TI Method (Texas Instruments), ORDIT (Newcastle University and others), Enterprise Modelling Methodology (Texas Instruments and Architecture Projects Management), Business Relationship Modelling (Texas Instruments) and Catalysis (Icon Computing and Trireme).

SCIPIO uses prevailing standards, including: UML, Workflow Management Coalition, RM-ODP, DSDM, and the European Foundation for Quality Management.

SCIPIO is being developed collaboratively by a small team of tools and methods experts. Major contributions have been made by Clive Mabey, Michael Mills, David Iggulden, Ian Macdonald and Richard Veryard.

The following companies offer SCIPIO products and services. Please visit their websites or contact them directly for more details.

SCIPIO Consortium

The SCIPIO Consortium is dedicated to the constant improvement of business processes by exploiting latest advances in information technology and in our understanding of how to use them. The Consortium will:

• provide a framework (for strategy and management) that links fast and cost- effective approaches both for exploring the nature of business processes and for deploying the latest forms of information technology, so that processes can be engineered better.
• oversee the evolution of the framework in line with developments in understanding of processes and supporting technologies.
• encourage and enable user organizations to improve the effectiveness of their business processes and the IT resources that support them.
• certify practitioners and trainers to allow them to deliver and deploy the approach and bring both short- and long-term benefits to its users.