Overview

The purpose of the Business Modeling workflow is to model the business context of your system in the form of a business model. A business model typically contains:

• 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, perhaps the marketing and accounting departments, and the external systems that it will interact with.

• 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.

• A glossary of key terms

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

• A business process model, traditionally called an analysis data-flow diagram in structured methodologies, depicts the main business processes, the roles/organizations involved in those processes, and the data flow between them. Business process models show how things get done, as opposed to a use case model that shows what should be done.

Your goal is to evolve a common understanding of your system with its stakeholders, including your users, senior management, user management, your project team, your organization s architecture team, and potentially even your operations and support management. Part of the consensus between your project stakeholders is agreement as to the scope of your project what your project team intends to deliver.