Who is Responsible for Defining the Business Model?

The example of Rauha Communications illustrates a fundamental advantage of business model definition: it encourages communication and coordination between the people who are responsible for justifying IT projects to the business. This group often involves more actors than either of the other two activities of BTM. The primary responsibility for modeling the business falls upon business analysts ” members of the IT department who specialize in identifying how the business should put IT to work. These business analysts typically coordinate with representatives from different business units to collect the relevant design information (as illustrated by the inclusion of the marketing manager, director of sales, and customer support supervisor in the example from Rauha Communications). In addition, process experts should contribute to the model as well, since they will eventually be responsible for ensuring that the business processes developed during process automation match up with each business scenario model.

Convincing each of these actors to embrace business model definition is an essential requirement for companies who are looking to adopt BTM. By making this move, they help to close disconnects between IT and the business, breakdown the silos that hamper holistic business planning, and end dependency on simple, paper-based strategy documents. But business model definition also provides another important advantage: it helps analysts to decompose abstract ideas about the design of the business into concrete elements. These elements can then be directly linked to the business processes that will be impacted during process optimization ”the second activity of BTM.