Emily’s Rebellion
A business guide to designing better transactional services for the digital age
A new approach to designing your business
The book Emily’s Rebellion presents a new method of removing the complexity from business processes and information systems called the ‘Transaction Pattern’. Emily, our protagonist, has learned about Service Design and loves it, but she needs a way to bridge the gap between her
customer-focused service blueprint and the technical-minded developers.
The authors deliver a clear set of steps that enable Emily to translate her transactional service design into a structured set of requirements, so she can engage the solution delivery teams in a coordinated and helpful way.
Discussing requirements
Emily realises that transactions update her firm’s master data – she creates requirements that reflect how the data will evolve through the customer lifecycle.
Data the heart of us
Emily notices every transaction follows the same pattern of tasks. She uses this pattern to workshop and specify business requirements for a transaction in a disciplined way.
Design for the digital age
Emily’s first steps are to work on her processes, before the IT department even asks her for requirements. She uses service design techniques and divides the process into transactions.
Operating an enterprise
Emily starts to align language across all the transactional services to make it easier for operations staff to see how things are going.
Who is Emily?
Emily is the embodiment of many young business people the authors have worked with on system projects. She faces a wall of “you don’t understand how complex it is”, “You don’t have enough experience to make changes”, “Best we keep going with the current work the way it is”, and “We will
think about improvements later.” Emily becomes disillusioned and disempowered.
But then – Emily realises business and data engineering is not an IT exercise. It does not need developers, packages, testers or IT project managers. They deliver solutions to problems. The real question is “what is your problem?”
About the authors
Lloyd and Graham have brought their rebellious approach to
several major business system initiatives.
Lloyd is a recognised authority on data management. He regularly consults and trains in data strategy and management across Australia.
Graham is a business architect with 30 years’ experience on Australian and New Zealand government agencies. He is skilled at steering a path between business and IT.
