ECM Blog (Enterprise Content Management Blog)

Monday, August 21, 2006

Business Model - Business Item Diagram

Business Item Diagram captures the relationships and correlations among various business items. Here, business items can be products, manufacturing equipments, real estate properties, and anything that is related to daily business operation of a company. Well-run businesses normally have good definitions of these business items and people from various functional groups use the common terminology when they communicate to one another.

How does this business model analysis help in terms of ECM Modeling? Business events and processes are strongly tied to the dynamics of these business items. Business events, business processes, and business items all spring the need for documentation. Most of the times, taking one-step back and capturing these business item diagrams allow us to develop a convention with which we can build a desirable taxonomy (folder structure) for business documents.

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Sunday, August 13, 2006

Business Model – Functional Group Diagram

Shown in the above is an example of a functional group diagram. This diagram captures the make-up of business functional groups and high-level flow of business operation. To be able to put this type of diagram together, you will first have to talk to various functional groups within the organization and ask what the roles and responsibilities are for those groups. It is also important to understand what the company does as a whole and what their core competencies are (How they generate profit).

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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Business Modeling

When conducting Modeling activities for ECM (Enterprise Content Management) solution, it is critical that we understand the Business Model. A Business Model is the design or plan for operations that will offer a product or service of value to a defined set of customers in a way that is beneficial for customers, suppliers, investors, shareholders, and other parties involved. It is the totality of:

How it will select, acquire, and manage its customers
How it defines its products and other business items
How it goes to the market
How it organizes its workforce
How it defines the roles and responsibilities of workforce
How it defines processes and procedures
How it captures profit

With that said, how can we capture the Business Model? Capturing the Business Model requires certain level of abstraction and simplification with a focus on certain aspects of the business. The artifacts you can generate as a result of Business Modeling would include the following:

Functional Group Diagram
Product / Business Item Diagram
Business Goals / Problems
ECM Vision Statement

In the following blogs, I will walk through these items to explain in detail with some examples.

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