This view of the Enterprise Business Motivation Model is concerned with the operations of a business. When change occurs, it nearly always plays out through impacts in the operations of a business: in the business processes executed by the business and the business policies and rules that govern those processes.
The following diagram illustrates the various elements of the operational aspect of the EBMM. (Click to enlarge).
For the sake of the Enterprise Business Motivation Model, a business process is defined as a collection of activities that take one or more inputs and transform them into process outputs in support of a valuable business outcome.
Business units are responsible for performing the Business processes. For businesses that take a process-centric view, the process is something that the business unit is responsible for, but it exists to serve the needs of the business, not the particular unit that happens to have control over it. This is an important distinction, and one that is critical for businesses to truly improve their internal business process efficiency and effectiveness.
The capabilities of a business unit are implemented through a business process. Note that the business process itself can be outsourced to a different company. This fact does not relieve the business unit of its responsibility for the performance of the process, just the activities involved in doing the work.
A process metric is a measurement collected during the operation of a business process. Typically these measurements can be used to track the flow of materials in or out of a process, or the resources consumed, but a process metric may measure any aspect of a process. Typically, a Key Performance Indicator is a process metric that is selected for its relationship to the value chain.
A success metric is not necessarily a measurement of a process, but rather a way, devised by business stakeholders, to measure the value that a process provides.
For example, let’s say your company attends a convention and sets up a booth. You hand out swag and talk about your product. At the same time, you collect business cards. Let’s say that you have created a business process for entering those leads into a database and flagging the ones that should be followed up on.
A valid process metric may be “number of unique lead records collected from each conference.” A success metric, on the other hand, may be “number of product demonstrations to qualified prospects that originated from conventions.”
The business policy and business rules relationships are derived from our understanding of the OMG models at a very high level. The only elements included in the EBMM are Policy Type, Business Policy, and Business Rules and Facts.
Policy Type is a classifier for the type of policy. Different types of policies may have different levels of governance or compliance attached to them. For example, a required corporate policy may be non-negotiable, while a corporate standard may allow for exceptions. The EBMM does not specify a standard list of policy types.
The distinction between “business policy” and “business rule” is designed to allow flexibility between policies, which are designed for people to comply with, and business rules, which can be understood both by people and by computer systems.
The detailed description of business rules and facts is a practice that is recognized by the EBMM yet remains outside the scope of this model. The “Business Rules and Facts” entity provides an anchor point for the connection of business rules to the rest of the motivation model.