History and Sources of Influence

The Enterprise Business Motivation Model was created to bring together a

number of different sources of conceptual input. This section will describe the

sources used to construct the EBMM.

The first source is the internal Enterprise Architecture team within the Microsoft

corporation. This provides a real-world view of business motivation, and the

ideas introduced in the model are colored by the experience of using the

model in a practical environment.

While the Microsoft IT model is directly tied to practice, it is a compromise view

of the current state of thinking at the time it was developed. As such, it is more

complex than necessary and misses opportunities to integrate with wider

research. On the positive side, this model provides a great deal of source

material for business capability modeling, information modeling, program and

project modeling, process improvement, and program governance. All of

these issues are very well covered in this model and provide much of the

foundation for thinking about business motivation context for the EBMM.

Figure 1 -- Microsoft IT Common Conceptual Model, v3

The second source is the standards community, represented by the OMG and

the Open Group’s efforts in describing a business motivation model in their

standards efforts.

Specifically, from the OMG comes the Business Motivation Model, a basic

model that describes business motivation in terms of "means," "ends,"

"influencers," and "assessments." This high level view is further broken down

into subject areas that define strategy, tactics, business rules, policies, goals,

objectives, and types of influencers.

There are a number of useful concepts missing from this view, which limit the

value of the BMM in business architecture endeavors.

a) There is no notion of the business itself being a composition of many

sets of business models, each with their own means and ends. This

limits the ability to discuss the possibility that two "parts" of the business

may have competing goals, or to discuss the relative merits of

performing a project to support one goal instead of another.

b) There is no notion of a business unit or the organization of business

units. This is important for grounding the business architecture efforts,

as most of the concerns of business architects focus on resolving

issues that span one or more business units.

c) Many of the key concerns of business architects focus on evaluating the

readiness of specific business processes, tools, technologies,

information, people, and governance structures in the light of these

motivations. As a result, the model is fairly incomplete in that most of

these concerns cannot be addressed with the model as it stood.

As a result, while the BMM is useful for modeling the "idea" of a business, it

turns out it is not useful for modeling the complex and diverse organizations

that tend to employ business architects, or to meet the needs of these

practicing architects in their fields.

Figure 2 -- Object Management Group Business Motivation Model

The contribution from the Open Group comes in the form of the metamodel

developed and delivered in TOGAF ("The Open Group Architectural

Framework") version 9.0. The core metamodel, as defined in section 34.3.3 of

TOGAF, provides some insight into the level of sophistication of the TOGAF at

this stage of development. In that model, the business is not actually modeled

except as a hierarchy of organizational units.

This model fails in the basic requirements of Business Architecture to model

the structural elements of the business itself, relying on the proxy of business

unit to include those elements in their definition. As most businesses with

more than 300 employees have a business architecture that does not

consistently use business units as the building blocks of the architecture, this

assumption produces a metamodel that cannot produce viable models of

influence, structure, intent, information flow, interrelationships, and business

rules. As a result, the TOGAF, while purporting to be an EA framework, fails

to capture most of the key concerns of business architecture.

Figure 3 -- The Open Group Architectural Framework, v9.0 Metamodel

The third source is the literature of the business community, including

influence from the writings of well known authors like Geary Rummler, Alan

Brache, and Alexander Osterwalder.

One strong influence comes from the work of Alexander Osterwalder, whose

Ph.D. thesis described the concept of a business model as a specific

composition of business elements. Dr. Osterwalder is a young management

consultant in Europe and was not aware of the work of Enterprise Architecture

or Business Architecture before writing his Ph.D. thesis on business models

and a subsequent book on the topic.

While the book, "Business Model Generation" is a highly accessible book, it

also fails to deal with the fact that large organizations have multiple business

models and that they do not nest neatly within one another. The resulting

models are useful when analyzing a business model, but not useful for

modeling an entire organization composed of many businesses.

That said, his book has generated a great deal of interest in business models

and was instrumental in the development of the business model section of the

EBMM. An image of the Business Model Canvas is included below for

context. The business model canvas is a useful artifact for collecting

information about the elements of a business model from Osterwalder's

viewpoint, including Partners, Activities, Resources, Value proposition,

Customer Relationships, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure and

Revenue Streams.

Figure 4 -- An example of Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas

The fourth source is the literature of the Enterprise Architecture community,

including influence from the writings of well known authors like Jeanne Ross,

Peter Weill, Steven H. Spewak, James McGovern, and Scott Ambler.

These sources are interesting, but they don’t speak in unison and most don’t

attempt to cover the entire range of knowledge from business strategy and

motivation through organizational structure, business process management,

and information technology. Each source takes their own viewpoint, and solves

problems in their own domain.

The Enterprise Business Motivation Model, by adopting and integrating ideas

from these widely divergent sources, attempts to create a single approach for

the understanding of business that represents the best practices available

today for both strategic planning within a business as well as for IT alignment

to business needs.