Methodology

1
Gap Analysis of Microsofts Akula - An
Information Excellence Initiative Project
Deepak KumarThe Information School, University
of Washingtondkumar_at_u.washington.edu

• A Few Findings
• Next Steps
• Gap Analysis was performed for a subset of the
  Akula information excellence initiative. Further
  effort will be required to complete all the
  required tasks.
• Complete analyzing functional technical
  document for all the three project themes.

• Introduction
• The goal of Akula is to make employees more
  efficient and effective through easy access,
  exchange and use of relevant information and
  knowledge on an intranet which consists of over
  20,000 team sites (both managed unmanaged),
  having more than 3 million web pages encompassing
  over 70 countries (statistics as of Dec 2002).
• Project Goals
• Perform a gap analysis for the Microsofts
  information excellence initiative project for
  their FY03-04 deliverables. It includes
  understanding the user scenarios (requirements),
  comparing it against the desired end states,
  using functional and technical design
  specifications from multiple perspectives
  technological, personal, and organizational.

• Methodology
• The methodology is focused on these four
  dimensions User centric, Product centric,
  Project theme centric and Stakeholders centric.
  Here are the steps to Gap Analysis -
• Based on the project themes user scenarios will
  be categorized under three project themes.
• Similarly, the entire requirements will be
  categorized under project themes. Any Gap between
  user scenarios and requirements will be
  identified.
• Functional technical documents will be analyzed
  and compared with the requirements. Any gap will
  be identified.
• Requirements, Functional specification and
  Technical specification will also be analyzed
  from three different perspectives.

• Analysis in Action

Gap Analysis Framework
Theme 1 Theme 2 Theme 3
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