This company provides news services to newspapers and broadcasters. They are in several quite different businesses:

• Gathering news and providing it electronically.
• Manufacturing, renting, and maintaining the equipment for receiving the news.
• Renting satellite bandwidth.
• Selling rights to use photographs.

The project began as a strategic study, to identify the principle areas where information could be used. It then moved to include requirements analysis for a system to handle logistics, from the establishment of news services through billing.

Data models were the principle product, and care was taken to produce models that were general enough to describe all of the lines of business. These were presented to and agreed to by the principle line managers of the organization and then became the basis for subsequent development of a logistics system.