Busienss Domain vs. Line of Busienss

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malcolm.neumeyer
Posts: 2
Joined: 17 Jul 2012, 21:00
Location: Carmel, Indiana, USA

I am trying to model an organization that is comprised of several organizational units (based on the TOGAF 9.1 definition of Organization Unit). There is a single parent organization, then three core/primary organizational units. Each Primary organizational unit has (n) organizational units within it. Each of the organizations may have their own set of business, technology, infrastructure, and application groupings(layers).

The essential project has the concept of Domain, but this is in the context or/contained within an organization. How could I model( or extend the current implementation) to handle this many -> many relationships. Also as a note - we are working towards ( a future architecture state) some form of consolidation of organizational processes/functions into common processes/functions provided by the root organization as well as a sub-organizational unit providing some common processes.

Basically its a recursive many -> many relationship. In addition, we are using TOGAF 9.1 as our foundational meta-model - so I am overlaying/mapping TOGAF 9.1 terms onto/into the essential meta model.

As I work with the tool, I will provide additional feedback (if I can determine how to handle some of these situations).
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Thanks for this post, Malcolm.

The structure of the organisation is modelled using the Actor class. We can define a Group Actor instance to represent the overall organisation and then use the containment relationship to capture the next level down, to whatever level of granularity that we require.

This is in the Physical view of the Business Layer as we are describing the actual organisation. We can also capture the logical design of the organisation in terms of the Roles that we want to have (or actually have) in the organisation. Again we can have these at any level of granularity.

There are a number of relationships between the processes, the applications that support those processes and the technology that support those applications and the Actors and the Roles - enabling us to understand who is doing what and which technologies they are depending on.

To define which Business Processes, Applications, Technology architectures etc. belong to which organisation, we use the Stakeholders slot on any of the instances to define a relationship to that organisation with the role that they are playing. For example, to show which organisation owns a Business Process, we can define a Role called something like 'Organisation Process Owner' and use this in the stakeholder relationship between the Process and the Actor for the organisation unit.

The stakeholders relationship gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of the sorts of relationships that we want to define to Actors such as organisation units.

By the way, we do have a TOGAF Pack (Essential Viewpack for use with TOGAF® 9 Framework) that provides a TOGAF perspective to Essential Viewer and describes how to use the Essential Meta Model to capture and manage the TOGAF concepts.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
malcolm.neumeyer
Posts: 2
Joined: 17 Jul 2012, 21:00
Location: Carmel, Indiana, USA

Thank you Johnathan. Where is the Essential Viewpack for TOGAF located? I do not see it in the Essential Project Share Repository.

I will see if I can model our business using the current meta-model. I will first map the Essential Meta-Model to TOGAF for our team to understand the overlaps and gaps.
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

The Essential Viewpack for TOGAF® 9 Framework is available from our sponsors, EAS. This is open source but there is a charge for the pack as TOGAF is licensed from the Open Group and the licensing incurs a cost.

If you would like to find out more about this pack, please contact the team through the Services forms.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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