SUMMARY
Your enterprise business model describes your enterprise and its environment, including your enterprise mission and vision, critical business processes, your main business entities and the relationships between them, your organization structure, and the locations at which you do business. Your enterprise business models should be concise, providing a high-level overview of your enterprise without getting into a lot of unnecessary (and usually unwanted) detail. Enterprise business modeling provides the foundation for much of your other enterprise management efforts, including enterprise architecture (Chapter 9), portfolio management (Chapter 8), and enterprise administration (Chapter 12). A solid understanding of your enterprise is a success factor for system development efforts, making your enterprise business models a valuable resource for project teams.
Suggested Reading
We've found the following books to be valuable business modeling resources:
Business Process Modeling, Simulation, and Design (Laguna and Marklund 2004). This textbook covers the fundamental skills required to be a successful business modeler.
Enterprise Modeling with UML (Marshall 2000). This book describes how to use the diagrams of the UML to model an enterprise and is arguably the book on this topic.
Does IT Matter? (Carr 2004). In the May 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review, Nicolas Carr published an article questioning whether investment in information technology truly provides competitive advantage. He expanded this article into the book Does IT Matter? This book highlights the need to truly understand your business when implementing new technologies and is a must-read for any enterprise modeler.
Requirements Analysis (Hay 2003). This book provides a very good description of how to model within an organization that has adopted the Zachman Framework.
The Object Primer, 3rd Edition (Ambler 2004). This book summarizes 35 modeling techniques, including most of the techniques suggested in this chapter.