Introduction

The purpose of the Business Modeling workflow is to develop an understanding of the business context of your system. Eriksson and Parker (2000), in their book Business Modeling with UML, believe that business modeling is important to your development efforts because it acts as the basis for:

• better understanding the key mechanisms of an existing business,

• creating suitable information systems that support the business,

• improving the current business structure and organization,

• showing the structure of an innovated business,

• experimenting with new business concepts or to copy/study the business concepts of a partner or competitor, and

• identifying outsourcing opportunities.

A business model typically contains:

1. A context model that shows how your system fits into its overall environment. This model will depict the key organizational units that will work with your system, perhapsthe marketing and accounting departments, and the external systems it will interact with. By developing the context model, you come to an understanding of the structure and culture of the organization and its external business environment that your system will exist in and support.

2. A high-level use case model, typically a portion of your enterprise model (perhaps modeled in greater detail), that shows what behaviors you intend to support with your system.

3. A glossary of key terms (something that is evolved as part of your Requirements model).

4. An optional, high-level class diagram (often called a Context Object Model, a Domain Object Model, or a Conceptual Object Model) that models the key business entities and the relationships between them.