Brunel University’s Business Class: Business content

Last time Professor Robert Macredie and Dr Mark Lycett started looking at how to understand what your business really does, so allowing a model-driven approach to software. Now it's time to think about content...

Continuing our ‘business modelling’ theme, this article will focus on the first aspect of a model driven approach - the need to understand the key things in your business, their relationships and what they both mean. Most organisations and the approaches towards software development they employ do not do this. Instead they focus on questions of 'how' they do what they do as opposed to questions of 'what' and 'why'.

Changing the focus is important if we are to improve the business alongside its operation. It will mark a break with tradition, as previously businesses have concentrated solely on improving operation - this is limiting in the extreme. Yet, used to its full potential, business modelling can play much more of a part in driving rather than simply supporting business change.

Our current fixed mindset is no great surprise - we often operate with an unconscious awareness of something. This is generally coupled with an inability to explain it as our perceived understanding is assumed: it just ‘is’. This is perhaps one of IT’s key constraints: our own development of it. The challenge we must set ourselves is to step beyond our assumptions, breaking into a new thought pattern of what a business is.

To use an example, most organisations think of customer as a ‘thing’ that is important to the business (perhaps exacerbated by the fact that customers are nearly always a ‘thing’ in business application software). But would you describe yourself as a customer? Well, no. Arguably, you might be seen as a customer in the context of a particular relationship you have with an organisation but a customer is not what you 'are' (unless you are single-mindedly materialistic!).

Herein lies the conundrum: from a business perspective, tradition mandates that an organisation sees you and deals with you as a ‘thing’ (hence the standard nasty letters from the bank). Understanding, however, moves concentration to the notion of the relationship and what is wanted/expected/etc. from it. It’s easy to see which approach is potentially better for results!

The example should be good enough to illustrate that we need some conscious review of the way that we approach understanding and modeling in organisations. The 'unconscious awareness' discussed above is an extension of a ‘computing’ view of life which has permeated the business domain. This logical view divides the world into ‘data’ and ‘process’ as a surrogate to things, relationships and the way both can change, at a business level. The former is based on an operational and not a business (or 'enlightened' business) view of life. A further example explains this in more depth.

Assume that you pay some money into your bank account and the bank has to handle that transaction (via an account movement). Now ask yourself what the account and account movement are from a business perspective. Typically, within the IT system, you could expect to see a model that reflected things as ‘data’ in the form of an 'account' and an 'account movement record' for example, alongside an 'account movement' process. That doesn't give you much of a business understanding. The terms are purely classifications.

If you think about the account movement as a change, however, you can reflect upon other issues, such as what that change means to the business, how it might be best handled in the context of our previous 'customer relationship' example. It may be that changes can be seen as differences in the pattern of relationships between things.

Put simply, the terms currently used within IT systems to structure operation - ‘data’ and ‘process’ do not respectively map onto ‘things’ and ‘changes’ in the real world - both can represent either. So while, data and process may (or may not) be effective for making business models operational, they are limited tools for business understanding.

In summary, how a business lives and breathes is more than a collection of data and processes. This fixed mindset of organisational classification is what we must escape from. What we need to do in order to truly understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a business is to develop a new way of thinking about the business and how to model it which allows us to gain an enlightened and more accurate view of the organisational world ('and beyond', as Buzz Lightyear would say). Only by focusing on the nature of things and the relationships between them, can we begin developing a content model and so create the foundation for a model-driven approach to software development.