Building a Simple, Useful Business Model
We’ve seen different IT organizations do many different things when it comes to modeling business requirements. Some consider that part of the “Business Architecture”, some do workshops for every project as it starts, some task the service managers with the role of understanding their customer’s needs. With all these different techniques, many companies still have a hard time aligning IT to the business.
At Adaptivity we set out to help our clients model workloads by creating a model of the business that’s as useful as it is simple. Now, it is one of the most powerful features within IT Planning Studio. We established two primary goals when we built the business modeling aspect of IT Planning Studio. The first goal was to make it simple enough that a model could be created in a reasonable amount of time and easily maintained. Too many business architectures are the result of an army of consultants and become shelf-ware because the IT organization does not have the resources to maintain them. Second, we sought to maximize the model’s usefulness in making decisions about data, application and infrastructure architectures. After all, what good is a model of IT’s customer (the business) if it provides no insight or guidance on how IT can address the business’ needs?
Building out the business model is a three-step process using IT Planning Studio.
- Select an Industry Template to start from. At the bottom of the IT Planning Studio Home Screen is the section for “Create New Model”. You will need to name your model and then you can select a Pre-defined Industry. Adaptivity provides several different templates for industries from banking to logistics. If you don t find one that you think would be appropriate for your industry, simply select “User Defined” and you ll get a blank form to build from. Once you click “Create New” you ll be asked to enter a brief description before continuing.
Selecting an Industry Template in IT Planning Studio
- Define the BVC. This will take you to the “Define Business Map” screen. This is where the business model is created. The first level that you need to consider is the Business Value Chain (BVC). This means you need to define the business functions and business activities that your company is involved in. For example, in the Capital Markets industry template there are five business functions; Sales, Trading, Operations, Risk and Reporting. Each of these business functions has several activities that allow the function to be completed. For example, the Sales Business Function involves Client Screening, Research and Client Relationship Management. The template will have these prefilled, but, since every organization is different, you will need to move functions and activities or create new ones using this easy SaaS tool.
The IT Planning Studio BVC Editor
- Describe the BVC. Once you ve created a model of your business, it’s time to describe it in a way that the IT organization can use to facilitate decisions. Adaptivity has created two ways to do this. First, at the Business Function Level you can define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These will help IT balance concerns such as cost reduction and reliability when making decisions about how to operate IT. At the business activity level, there is a very detailed quality profile to fill in. The quality profile exposes the business activity’s requirements around availability, communication, complexity, security, user interface, user, workload type, workload volume and data usage. The business activity quality profile will help you understand information and application requirements for data and those applications that support the business activity. You can modify KPIs by double-clicking the business function and selecting the “KPI” tab. You can modify the business activity’s quality profile by double-clicking the business activity and then selecting the “Quality Profile” tab.
Modifying a Business Activity's Quality Profile in IT Planning Studio
Modifying a Business Function's KPIs in IT Planning Studio
Once you’ve built the business model in IT Planning Studio you can output blueprint sheets that depict the business. You can also map your applications to the business model in order to rationalize the applications that you have or to look at the type of infrastructure or cloud deployment that the application is leveraging.
