Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling

Disciplines > Business Modeling > Concepts > Scope of Business Modeling

A business-modeling effort can have different scopes depending on context and need. Six such scenarios are listed below.

Scenario #1—Organization Chart

You may want to build a simple map of the organization and its processes to get a better understanding of what the requirements are on the application you are building. In this case, business modeling is part of the software-engineering project, primarily performed during the inception phase. These types of efforts often start out as merely charting with no intent of changing the organization, however, in reality, building and deploying a new application always includes some level of business improvement.

Scenario #2—Domain Modeling

If you are building applications with the primary purpose of managing and presenting information, such as an order management system or a banking system, you may choose to build a model of that information at a business level, without considering the workflows of the business. This is referred to as domain modeling. See Workflow Detail: Develop a Domain Model. Typically, domain modeling is part of the software-engineering project, and is performed during the inception and elaboration phases of the project.

Scenario #3—One Business Many Systems

If you are building a large system, or a family of applications, you may have one business-modeling effort that will serve as input to several software-engineering projects. The business models help you find functional requirements, and they serve as input to building the architecture of the application family. See Guidelines: Going from Business Models to systems. The business-modeling effort is, in this case, often treated as a project on its own.

Scenario #4—Generic Business Model

If you are building an application that will be used by several organizations—for example, a sales support application or a billing application—it can be useful to go through a business-modeling effort to align the organizations as to how they do their business to avoid requirements that are too complex for the system (business improvement). If aligning the organizations is not an option, however, a business-modeling effort can help you understand and manage differences in how the organizations will use the application and will make it easier to determine which application functionality should be prioritized.

Scenario #5—New Business

If an organization has decided to start a completely new line of business (business creation), and will build information systems to support it, a business-modeling effort needs to be performed. In this case, the purpose of business modeling is not only to find requirements on systems, but also to determine the feasibility of the new line of business. The business-modeling effort is, in this case, often treated as a project on its own.

Scenario #6—Revamp

If an organization has decided to completely revamp their way of doing business (business reengineering), business modeling is often one or several projects in its own right. Typically, business reengineering is done in several stages: envision the new business, reverse-engineer the existing business, forward-engineer the new business, and install the new business.

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