Example business process description
This example business process is based upon a real life situation but has been adapted to make it somewhat anonymous as well as emphasising certain aspects of the process in order to more fully illustrate what is possible with the Tiki platform.
The business operating/managing the Tiki platform uses it to provide a collaboration and information sharing platform for organisations that operate in a particular market segment where the market segment is characterised by:
- organisations that 'subscribe' to the platform and create content on it, that are a mixture of commercial, non-profit/voluntary groups as well as more formal statutory/NGO organisations, and
- by individual users that might actively work with a number of different organisations ie they may work for one organisation that collaborates/shares information with for example an NGO, and at the same time the individual may do voluntary work for other groups/organisations that use the system.
The Tiki platform is therefore configured so that each subscribing organisation has their own overall Workspace that comprises a set of five separate areas each assigned their own individual Tiki Category so that defined Groups can have either 'view only' or 'view/edit' permissions to access the content of an individual Workspace/level. The five levels within an organisation's Workspace are as follows:
- Level 1: an administration level typically restricted to a few key individuals within the subscribing organisation
- Level 2: a general internal level where access is granted more widely to individuals within the subscribing organisation
- Level 3: a collaboration level where information is shared with other organisations and access is provided to designated individuals that do not work for the Workspace owning organisation
- Level 4: a very general shared level, where information is placed that is made available to any/all validated users of the system, ie it is used by the subscribing organisation to share information with the whole community, who have all agreed to a set of usage terms and conditions, but where it may not be appropriate to make it public.
- Level 5: a public accessible level so that an organisation can either simply use it to direct users to their own web site or if they are a very small voluntary group for example, with limited skills/resources, they could use it to create a web presence to avoid the overhead of creating/managing their own site.
The key business processes that the business operating/managing the Tiki platform must carry out are:
- setting up a new subscribing organisation - creating their 5-level Workspace and establishing a first user, who has a special 'account management' responsibility,
- initial setting up of individual users who need to be provided with the appropriate permissions to access designated levels of designated Workspaces, where each user has to be invited to join the system by an existing user ie because of the collaborative nature of the platform, there is not an open user registration process (which does at least avoid all of the issues with 'spam' registrations )
- subsequent adds/moves/changes for users' permissions as they leave an organisation, join another, start collaborating with another, etc., etc.
The detailed tasks/steps associated with each of these business processes are now described.
Setting up a new subscribing organisation
Initial set up of a new invited user
Changing the access permissions for an existing user