Data Driven Decisions

Chapter 42Case Studies: ASEAN Aerospace Schema – Context Diagram

In this example, a Southeast Asian client hired Jahani and Associates to perform a valuation of their assets, specifically as they related to the space industry. This client was based in a Southeast Asian nation, and they developed a significant amount of technology that was proprietary to their system, and they believed it could have launched them into the next level of aerospace innovation.

J&A was hired both to build the company's desirability as an acquisition target and to indicate how the software that these engineers had developed was applicable to different teams within the aerospace framework. The deliverable that was developed heavily utilized context diagrams.

A context diagram, as has been explored deeply in parts of this book, is a way to show how an existing system interacts with external systems. The context diagram in and of itself is a relatively simple tool, but what it allowed J&A to do in the case of this aerospace example was indicate which external systems relied on data inputs from the core system that the engineers had developed.

By articulating this data need for these external systems, J&A was able to communicate the costs needed to develop the interfaces and provide direct data schemas, which included how they interacted and overlapped with requirements through both the external and internal system. Essentially, this allowed us to build a more fundable use case for a company which had ...