Lost Wax Agent Business Analysis

Lost Wax's Agent Business Analysis Process enables the roles and interactions that are involved in providing the client's service to be understood. This understanding enables us to identify and define the specific value added functions that agents can play in delivering the service. From this information Lost Wax creates a prototype solution that assists the client in determining how and where to best deploy agent based solutions.

The Agent Business Analysis Process is highly collaborative and we expect our client to gain significant knowledge and understanding of agent-based solutions as a result of going through it.

Stage 1: Roles-based Business Analysis

This stage maps out the roles in the client's business process of the agreed domain.

The starting point is a consideration of the human roles and the information resources that each role uses. The interactions between these roles are identified and added to form a roles and interaction model.

Stage 2: Agent Modelling

This stage identifies the agents required to perform the roles in the Roles and Interaction Model.

A role can be implemented in a single agent, or an agent may embrace and perform multiple roles. It is important to establish the business benefit that comes from deciding to use an agent to perform a specific role. Some roles may be better implemented using standard non-agent solutions.

The resulting Agent Model illustrates the boundaries of the agent system, the population of agents required to realise the business goals and the communication links between the agents.

For agents to understand and respond to their environment they must share a common language describing the business terms and concepts. Another key element of the Agent Definition process is therefore a consideration of the Knowledge Representations they will use.

Stage 3: Prototype Planning

Lost Wax collaborates with the client to define the most appropriate functionality for the prototype.

It is essential that the functionality included in a prototype is aligned with the client's business objectives rather than driven by technical capabilities. A key input to defining the Prototype Scope is therefore the evaluation criteria that will be applied to the prototype. Lost Wax works with the client to determine these criteria, including the data required to test the evaluation criteria, the scenarios that will be used and the presentation of the outputs.

Lost Wax defines a Technical Approach that fully supports the Prototype's scope. Our Technical Approach will be designed for a smooth evolution to the scope of the full solution.

Based on this Technical Approach Lost Wax will prepare an Implementation Plan for the rapid development and implementation of the Prototype, include effort and cost estimates and timescales.