Business Modeling
The need for modeling arises from the innumerable no of changes and decisions being made during the life cycle of a system. The business model is the initial requirement step
Modeling helps in formulating how a problem is perceived and provide the broad perspective necessary to identify appropriate solution. As an inevitable part of business projects it begins with requirement analysis where the objective, expected results from a system are defined descriptively followed by identifying the gap between current status and expected state. This end to end thread helps to validate the choice of business models and the implied requirement for the problem solution.
Once a problem is determined, the customer has to describe the problem. Normally the customer expresses requirements as solutions. It is the responsibility of the solution provider to educate the customer about the true nature of problem, and about the ramifications of the solution space. One of the most effective ways to capture the true requirement of the customer is scenario based requirement gathering, a scenario is a means to bridge the gap between the business consumer’s worldview and the system designers’ worldview, here the “Scenario” is defined as:
- An unambiguous view of what the consumer wants
- An unambiguous view of what the consumer is doing
A word of caution, the information in a scenario should be relevant to the business task that the scenario is illuminating. Extraneous information can be confusing, and can lead to unhappy results. A set of carefully selected and crafted scenarios provides the critical validation of the business requirements.
Considering software development space, given a business problem and a project assigned to provide solution. We must:
- Ensure business requirements are complete
- Identify the right business model
- Keep definition of problem separate from definition of solution.
