UI-Business Alignment

I imagine that it would be great to make what was specified by business analysts "talk" to system analysts and UI designers. The "talking" part is very challenging because what is specified by business analysts needs to be well understood by system analysts and UI designers. Besides, UI designers work on aspects of user interaction and they need to be acknowledged by business analysts as an added value for achieving specified business goals.

We see here the case of specifications from different departments that need to be connected to develop enterprise applications. This connection is not supposed to be so tight as to make it difficult to let it loose when necessary. It is rather useful to make the association evident so whenever there is a need to change, it is easy to detect which parts also need to be updated.

I have analyzed the situation in which business analysts use spreadsheets to associate business processes to screens. The time spent to keep these spreadsheets up-to-date is so high that they need to allocate people only for this job. Worse yet when they allocate a skillful business analyst to do this boring job.

So, I thought: how could we provide a solution for traceability between business processes and UIs? And better still: how could we activate the concern on user interaction?

Using a model-driven strategy, the use of an intermediate model can serve two main purposes: First, serve as a traceability link between business process models and UI models. Second, enable system analysts and UI designers to discuss about user interaction before getting into prototyping.

Could the time spent on updating long spreadsheets be, in any way, more useful than the time devoted for user interaction analysis?