A business motivation model is a structured method used to understand and ‘model’ a complex business. To understand how someone would use the EBMM, it is helpful to understand the overall context. What are we trying to accomplish with the model, and what does the model do for you?
Consider some of the following problems:
- You are a business executive with a great deal of responsibility. You are responsible for a large portion of the revenue of a major corporation, and you want to make sure that you have organized the business for success. Have you created the right departments, and assigned responsibilities correctly, or is there a hidden flaw in your structure? How would you find out what the optimum structure should be for your specific situation?
- You are a business analyst, working to insure that your business takes advantage of all of the new opportunities presented by the latest Stimulus bill to come out of Washington D.C. You see that the bill has relaxed a particularly onerous regulation, but has added three more that affect your business. What impact will these changes have on the business? What business processes need to change? How would you know?
- You are the CIO of your corporation, and your business stakeholders are looking at the IT department’s budget very carefully. After all, the IT department has traditionally been a place where a great deal of money goes in, but projects come out late (or not at all) without a stellar track record for reliability or quality. How do you justify the money spent on IT? Can you show that every dollar is being spent to support the strategic needs of the business? Can you prove that you are not wasting money on frivolous projects while deserving projects are starving for cash?
- You are in charge of the sales division for the Southwestern region of the United States for the Fabrikam corporation. The executives have just come out of their annual retreat and delivered their new business strategies for the year, and you can see that some of the product focus has shifted. Instead of pushing more retail stores to carry your the electronics line, your now need to focus on getting more subscribers to the company’s online store. What parts of your business need to change? What business processes are missing? What training do you need to deliver? Do you need new software? How would you know?
The field of Business Architecture is focused on collecting the necessary information, in the necessary way, so that questions like these can be answered without guessing.
These are important questions. In each of the situations described above, the information needed to make decisions can be very difficult to collect in hindsight. In other words, if you are not already collecting information, and preparing for the day when you will need to use it, then you will not be ready to answer these questions when the time arises.
That’s OK, the business leaders will figure it out, right? Isn’t that what they have always done? Perhaps, but in a globally competitive environment, the company that makes the best decisions is the one most likely to win in the marketplace, and the company with the best data is best prepared to make those difficult and critical decisions.
The enterprise business motivation model is a conceptual structure for collecting the right information, in the right relationships, so that difficult questions like those above can be answered in a rational manner.
Note that the EBMM is not a definition of a database. While a technologist certainly could create a data model from the EBMM, and use it to build a software system for business architecture, the necessary details needed to build that system are not described in this location.
That level of detailed analysis and design is not new. It has been done many times, by the companies that create and distribute Enterprise Architecture and Planning software. Those vendors closely guard their database schemas, for good reason. However, very few models have existed in the public domain that are rich enough to build software upon, while being designed to solve business problems instead of technology problems.
Until now, that is.
At a high level, the Enterprise Business Motivation Model can be used in each of these key business capabilities in order to improve the understanding of the business, and thereby improve the decisions made by the business:
- Development of business strategies and insuring that the work of the business aligns with those strategies.
- Evaluation of business positioning in the marketplace and examining opportunities to improve the value of the business through innovations to the business model.
- Implementation of government or industry-specific regulations, along with impact analysis and the development of business policies that drive the implementation or remove obstacles along the way.
- Creating a long-term roadmap for a series of improvements designed to make the business more competitive, efficient, effective, or responsive.
- As one of the many inputs needed to develop a funding and governance structure for the IT department. This governance structure insures that IT system development efforts are correctly timed, properly prioritized, in the appropriate technology, with the appropriate information available.
As you work through the model, please consider contributing to the body of knowledge needed to use it well, by contributing your ideas and feedback to this site.