Brunel University’s Business Class: Understanding your business

Professor Robert Macredie and Dr Mark Lycett look beyond model-driven architecture, stressing what a business does is far more important than how it does it…

Last month’s article gave an outline of the benefits – and pitfalls – of adopting a model-driven approach to software development. The first part of model-driven architecture, which involves understanding what a business is and what it does (the computational independent viewpoint) is the part that involves the most work and in which the least research has been done. However, most importantly, it’s also the part that can help both business and IT departments move away from the narrow nuts and bolts view of an IT system, take a step back and understand business needs with greater insight.

This is the real key to unravelling the knot that software development often finds itself in. All too often, IT departments can become bogged down in the technicalities of solving an IT problem, which drags them away from the real task at hand – that of understanding how the system can be developed to help the business. It’s no simple task but having gained a thorough understanding of the business - with a model-driven approach to software development - creating IT systems that fit and can adapt to business needs more closely should follow on more easily.

We believe a model-driven process of understanding the business can be divided into three aspects. The first aspect forms the foundation and has to do with business content – understanding the key ‘things’ in your business and the relationships between them. For example, is the nature of a customer really a ‘thing’ (as in many systems), or is it a relationship between two parties?

The second aspect relates to business performance – what are the key actions within the business and how are they handled?

The third aspect relates to business knowledge – what do you need to know about things and actions, when do you need to know it, what form does the knowledge need to take and how do you go about obtaining the knowledge?

The majority of development approaches tend to concentrate on how the business does what it does. But this can divert attention from the real, much more basic question of understanding what a business does. It’s a bit like learning a foreign language and trying to build an entire sentence before having a basic understanding of either grammar or vocabulary. The power of the content, performance and knowledge model is that the performance and knowledge models feed into the business content, providing a context to give it meaning. An understanding of the business drives the content aspect, while the performance and knowledge aspects are driven by how that understanding is applied.

Breaking down the understanding of a business like this allows for a clear view on how activity is apportioned and how a customer is serviced. Organisations tend to create work without necessarily thinking about the eventual outcome - the ‘what’. As a vignette, one of us recently wanted to transfer some money from a current account into a savings account to take advantage of higher interest rates. To do this, we were required to open a new savings account, with lots of paperwork involved on both sides. Every time a withdrawal was made, money had to be transferred back into the original account.

In terms of the bank’s targets, this exercise was probably deemed a success - a customer has been sold a second account (and there was some degree of lock-in to the funds). However, in real terms, the administration involved in processing the paperwork probably cost the bank a high percentage of the profit from the extra custom (and involves extra effort from a customer perspective). Surely it would have been far easier simply to have offered a higher interest rate on the existing current account? Overall, the business assumption was to offer a new product rather than a service, which we would argue is grounded in a poor understanding of things and relationships, performance and knowledge.

Moving to a method of software development based on the content model forces a business to consider what exists in the business and the relationships between those things. That understanding can then be overlaid with multiple application models of business performance and business knowledge.

Understanding these model-driven views should help organisations build systems that allow for more individual flexibility in the business – for example being able to sidestep restrictive processes in order to provide good service – or boost profits. Over time, careful interpretation of business understanding into content, performance and knowledge will offer a fruitful route to flexibility – by quickly adapting the models to a business’ specific circumstances or objectives.

With these models in place, supported by the right kind of delivery, mass customisation of services looks more realistic. The coming articles will enlarge the discussion into each area, providing a guideline on how a business can start to understand itself, ready to translate into a flexible information system that can support that understanding.