While modeling the business domain of an enterprise we are using two different viewpoints. One viewpoint is focused on the “What”, what the enterprise needs in order to reach its goals and objectives. The other viewpoint is the “How”, how the enterprise is working to support goals and objectives. This post is about the “What” and the “How” of mapping the enterprise business domain. We call the “What” capabilities and the “How” process configuration variants. Capabilities express what the enterprise has to do to reach goals and objectives. Process configuration variants express how the business manages to perform capabilities in reality. Capabilities is actually collective name to process scenario groups, process scenarios and processes that already defined by the solution composer. Those definitions help us to understand what the business is doing to reach it goals and objectives. Due to the solution composer high level of abstraction we also defines that business processes can be broken to any needed level of sub processes to meet the enterprise real life needs. While capabilities explain what we are doing processes configuration variants (PCV) describe how a given capability is being done in reality. PCV is composed from roles that participant in the process and the “process steps” that they are doing in the process. This concept is also taken from the solution composer and the solution manager. Again to adapt it to enterprises we add events and roles to the process description. Events can be starting event, end event, messages, timer exception or any other event define in the BPMN 1.0 standard ( http://www.bpmn.org/Documents/BPMN%20V1-0%20May%203%202004.pdf ). Roles can be XOR, OR, AND or any other business roles that might impact the processes. Each capability should have at least one PCV that describe how this capability id being done. There are occasions where several PCV needed to describe certain capability or that one capability is being done differently across the enterprise and therefore we need several PCV to describe it. The relation between capabilities and PCV are many to many. There might be more then one PCV to describe capabilities and while describing capability you might use sub capabilities. We explicitly make a clear change between capabilities and Process Configuration Variants for one main reason. Capabilities are hardly changed while PCV tend to change a lot. If you’re coming from development background it more or less the same as interfaces and implementations. For example, the way that certain capability is carried on might be changed each time that new manager got responsibility over a capability. Separation of those views let us to focus on the capabilities. From practice point of view that help us to minimize effort by keeping the current picture of capabilities and drilling down to PCV just when we need it. Natty Gur
