Description
Business modeling helps to analyze a business and mold it to meet its goals, by capturing the organization, processes, objects, services, and events of a business, which can tell us how a business functions today or help us plan for it to function in the future. We may also use business modeling to focus on pertinent areas of the business to inform a systems development project about the business processes, business objects, and business rules to be automated.
There are a number of recent drivers that are encouraging businesses to model, including compliance and SOA. Large organizations that may have done no business modeling in the past, have recently had to document many of their business processes to meet compliance requirements. Likewise, organizations that are contemplating a move to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are finding that the "Business Services" that they are building, are tied intimately to how their business operates, and can only be properly designed through modeling.
Although there is no single required way to model a business, and organizations have many options for tools and techniques to do their modeling, the most powerful modeling approaches, called notations, are Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). When selecting a modeling approach, it can be helpful to consider whether the models can be captured in an industry standard fashion, and reused widely in the organization, and UML and BPMN both meet this need. But even ad hoc modeling with basic tools, can be very helpful in understanding your business.
Common Problems Addressed by This Offering
- Compliance Mandates
- New to SOA Adoption
- Existing SOA has too many services or services that aren't understandable
- System consolidation and rationalization
- Need for standardization of terminology and data