Business Modeling Scenarios

A business-engineering effort can have different scopes depending on context and need. We list six such scenarios below.

Scenario 1: Organization Chart

You may want to build a simple chart of the organization and its processes so that you get a good understanding of the requirements of the application you are building. In this case, business modeling is a part of the software-engineering project, primarily performed during the inception phase.

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. Domain modeling is typically part of the software-engineering project, and 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 will help you find functional requirements, as well as serve as input to building the architecture of the application family. In this case, the business-modeling effort is 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 regarding the way they do business to avoid requirements that are too complex for the system. Or, if aligning the organizations is not an option, a business-modeling effort can help you understand and manage differences in the ways the organizations will use the application and make it easier to prioritize application functionality.

Scenario 5: New Business

If an organization has decided to start a completely new line of business, and 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 of systems, but also to determine the feasibility of the new line of business. Often the business-modeling effort in this case is treated as a project on its own.

Scenario 6: Revamp

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

A few years ago, the term business-process reengineering ( BPR ) was very popular and meant a "revolutionary approach to reorganization." ^[2]

^[2] See, for example, the popular book by Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution . New York: HarperBusiness, 1993.