Using Context Diagram to describe a Bank System

This diagram shows the entirety of our proposed Bank System encapsulated as a single process that sends data to, and receives data from, various external interfaces.

The interfaces to the right represent human actors of the kind you might find on a UML Use Case Diagram, who will interact with our system in various ways. Customers can send deposit and withdrawal requests to our system and can receive statements from it. Bank Managers can sendopen and close account requests to the system and can receive management reports from it.Third Parties can send third party deposits to the system, but obviously not mkae withdrawal requests.

The first interface on the left of our diagram represents the Other Banks which may send or receivemoney transfers when interacting with our system. These other banks are likely to be system actors (i.e. computer programs) rather than human actors.

The second interface on the left of our diagram represents the Sales Agents, which are external affiliate companies or individuals who generate customer introductions for our system.

Note that while the context diagram shows the kind of data that is exchanged between our system and the external interfaces, it implies nothing at all regarding the sequence in which those data exchanges take place.

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Basic Principles for Business Analysis

Always seek to ask the right question in the right way of the right people at the right time.

Use no term in talking with business people about the business they wouldn’t use naturally.

• Avoiding all ITspeak is hard. Many familiar terms assume development of software systems. Two examples: use case and data model. Both terms originated from IT and imply a system. In developing business models you don’t need those terms(!).

Never say ‘user’.

• Here’s a related point. ‘Users’ exist only if you’re thinking about building an IT system. We avoid the term. In the business context, business people are not ‘users’, they are the central actors in the day-to-day drama of business activity. Anyway, everybody is a ‘user’ of some system these days, so ‘user’ doesn’t much discriminate anything.

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