Starting January 2007, five masters students in Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up to work on a SAP-sponsored capstone project. As one of the leading business application and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution vendors, SAP AG introduced SAP NetWeaver, a new technology platform that enables service-oriented composite application and services integration. Composite applications combine parts from disparate business systems within a unified user interface that can be tailored to the workflow of business users.
Our team was tasked with the broad challenge of exploring what is needed to bridge the gap between composite application development and business users without software development expertise. The current SAP's composite application design-time tools are in favor of developers rather than the business users due to the complex nature of the application framework. The composite applications designed without involving the business users is often under the risk of being disconnected from the context within which they are used.
Directed to create business user enabled composite application design-time tools, the project's scope was not to simply redesign the interface of current SAP design-time tools. To allow business users to participate in a more meaningful way in the development of the composite applications that will be used by them, we considered how composite applications could be introduced to the enterprises and end-users and who should be involved in the design. Through the user research, we identified a rich set of opportunities within the area of business process design and change management.
JIGSAW emerges as our solution after 8 months of rigorous research and iterative design. We focused on enabling business process experts to prototype composite applications by integrating the practices of business process modeling with the design of composite applications. Using JIGSAW, business process experts can propose a composite application that supports the task-oriented workflow while modeling out the entire business process. JIGSAW also allows business process experts to test the composite application modeled in action and to invite the end-users to try the prototype.