Need help modelling a shared services business setup

[mikelambrellis]

Hi there. Firstly, thanks for the great tool. I'm just having a play with it for the first time. I'm working in an organisation whose EA is currently manually maintained.

I'm trying to model the following situation and am unclear how to do so.

Two government authorities, Company A + Company B, have a number of business domain/capability overlaps. An IT shared services company Company X has been created to service both A & B and to try and maximise use of common systems.

We have a list of business domains and capabilities of which most are common but some capabilities are not relevant to Company B. Furthermore, in the current state, many of the capabilities are serviced by distinctly different application portfolios.

Is it possible to model this setup such that I can achieve views of the EA "by company" ( e.g. A, B, A+B). Should I be changing the meta-model to add a "Company" attribute to usages? Your advice is eagerly anticipated.

On an unrelated note, it occurs to me that the model doesn't really capture the "Who" (in Zachman terms) i.e. stakeholders, owners, customers/segments etc. I imagine it would be very useful to do so. Just a thought.

Anyway, thanks in advance and keep up the good work.

Cheers,
Mike.

[mikelambrellis]

I've just been looking at the Business Architecture meta-model diagram and perhaps what I need is something like the opposite of "Business Role Type - performs - Business Capability" i.e. something like "Business Organisation - consumes/uses - Business Capability" (and perhaps "Business Organisation - has/utilises - Business Domain" ?)

I could use "Business Role Type" as "Business Organisation" and add a new usage "consumes" between it and "Business Capability".

What do you think?

[jonathan.carter]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your post.

This is an interesting one that we've been talking about today. I think we need to explore it further but I wanted to get back to as soon as possible.

Jason (a member of the Essential Project team) has actually been working on an approach and tutorial for how services companies (typically, IT services providers) deliver capability to their clients, capture things that could and should be shared etc. Your scenario sounds similar to I'll ask Jason to jump in on this topic, too.

One thought that sprung to my mind as I read your first post was that the meta model makes no assumptions about being just for one organisation - the 'enterprise' can span organisational boundaries, right?
Building up from the physical, real world for a moment, I think I would most likely capture Company A and Company B as Group Actors in the physical Business Layer. This means that we can then capture which Application Providers (their applications) are used to support them as they perform certain Business Processes (moving up to the Logical Business Layer).

Moving up an abstraction layer, again, the Business Processes are mapped to the Business Capabilities that they realise.

There are some out-of-the-box views in Essential Viewer that will then show how the same capability is realised differently in different organisations and the different applications that each uses.

To identify two applications as providing the same behaviour, we create Application Services - that support the Business Processes - and map the Application Providers to the relevant Application Services, e.g. Siebel and SalesForce.com could be mapped to an Application Service, 'CRM System'.

The reason I bring these up is that the Application Services enable you to start managing the application portfolio - identifying opportunities to rationalise the portfolio or to see why we have perceived duplication.

Back to the logical business things and Business Roles in particular. These roles enable us to capture the design of the organisation using logical terms for the units that will make up the organisation - as opposed to actual teams (those are Group Actors). A technique that Jason mentioned to me earlier that he's used is where you have a shared service that could be provided by different organisations, e.g. in different geographical regions, then you define a Business Role for the service provider and then associate different Actors with that role as it is provided in different regions (by taking a role to play the service-provider's processes).

So, it's really through the Actors and Roles that we address Zachman's 'Who'. The Business Roles capture the 'design' of the 'Who' and the Actors capture the actual [physical] 'Who'.
Things like owners of Application Providers are captured as attributes on the Application Provider that are a relationship to the Actor - e.g. to show who the business owner is, who the IT owner is. So, in your scenario, Company A might have Application X that is owned (from a business perspective) by John Smith and from an IT perspective by Service Provider G. Company B might have Application Y (that provides the same Application Service as X!) that is owned by Fred Bloggs (business) but by Service Provider G (again) from an IT perspective.

Rather than go into more detail right now, how is this sort of thing sounding for your scenario? I realise that I've kind of given an indirect answer on this but maybe it will help us to discuss the scenario further.

Jonathan

[mikelambrellis]

Hi Jonathan, sorry its taken me so long to reply.
What you propose sounds interesting however how do I map each company's distinct Business Objectives to the group Actor representing the company? Should I be embedding the company name in the objective's name? It doesn't feel right but I don't see how else I can do it.

In looking at the available material, it seems that there is room for far more explanation than is currently available. Both for the meaning and intended uses of the classes themselves (as partially found in the various Architecture Modelling Overview pages), as well as some examples around the relationships.

Don't get me wrong. I think what you've achieved in little over a year is astounding and I'm very grateful. I look forward to learning alot more about the meta model through your responses and hope for more reference material and examples in the future.

Cheers,
Mike.

[jonathan.carter]

Hi Mike,

Apologies for taking so long to get back to you.
You're right about not using the company name into the Business Objective name - putting semantics into the name of an instance in the model is using storing up trouble for later.

We've been discussing how best to meet your requirements and we think we've got the right way forward for this - that enables you to relate the Objectives to the Actors. By the way, what you're trying to do makes complete sense - thanks for pointing this out!

I'll kick off one of our Essential Community Processes (ECP) for this and we should be able to get you something to try out in a matter of days.

I'll post back shortly when I've started the ECP for this and we'll get this. sorted.

On the documentation, you're right in that it's a bit sparse in this area. We'll try to address this - Jason's tutorial should help. In the meantime, please don't hesitate to post any queries to the forums.

Jonathan

[jonathan.carter]

I've kicked off ECP-7 to produce the required update to support this requirement and have captured some requirements in there. If you have any additional requirements, please post them as replies to the ECP-7 topic.

ECP-7 Business Objectives to Actor Relationships.

Thanks

Jonathan

[mikelambrellis]

Sorry for the late reply. My attention has been diverted to other tasks lately. Thanks for your help. I'll be tracking ECP-7 with interest.

[jonathan.carter]

Just to let you know that I've posted a proposed set of extensions in the ECP-7 topic.

This has a UML fragment to show the meta classes involved and their relationships. Also a link to a sample Protege project ontology to explore and try out the proposed update.

Jonathan