This note provides an overview of the Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) with the focus on increasing best value within an eBusiness environment to reduce development time, integration resource requirements and maintenance costs through reuse and coordination of efforts. The BCM’s advantage arises from its simplicity. By adopting and following an intuitive approach for [1] unconstrained conceptual alignment, [2] authoritative source collaboration, [3] layering of business constraints and constructs, and [4] the capture of rationale through templates one gains pragmatic interoperability as well as semantic interoperability. Stakeholders and can incorporate [5] UIDs either during development or align later to exchange precise communication to meet their business objectives.

The journey begins with establishing and outlining your organization’s strategy and tactics for how to achieve exact communications among your stakeholders. The task is expanded to identify and manage your information assets, their associated metadata, context, ontology and design rationale with common template-based mechanisms. These technology-neutral artifacts become the building blocks for assembling reusable components that increase productivity and enable the enterprise to become more agile. The methodology is a solution focused on aligning the semantics of the business through open mechanisms, such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) resulting in “fluid” data that removes the shackles that proprietary vendor solutions place on your enterprise. By facilitating the capture of business targets, best practice patterns and decision rationale with common mechanisms your enterprise will evolve and be competitive.

One objective of the business-centric model is to graphically represent the variety of shared artifacts for reuse, each having different constraints exercised. By applying the right constraints at the right level, and not physicalizing them too soon, the process enables business, not technology to drive the exchange. The result is a far more agile enterprise. Information exchange and proper interoperability are possible if, and only if alignment occurs from the (1) Conceptual, (2) Business, (3) Agreement and (4) Implementation layers.

• Conceptual – aligning terminology by understanding the semantics of the business and uncovering the real meaning of the business vocabulary use can be extracted and interpolated to higher business aggregates. One of the primary resulting products is the Concept Definition Template.

• Business - understanding of the core business goals that the “preferred” business objects must accomplish, constrained by the defined business processes and patterns. Business rules allow for the capture of enterprise logic by analyzing the impact of changes, identifying areas of reuse and defining functional requirements from an enterprise perspective – Target Constructs in your business context.

• Extension – provides outreach for mapping the enterprise Target constructs to the desired industry consortiums, standard bodies, and internal legacy systems format. The product of this mapping includes a Baseline Specification for each desired community perspective.

• Implementation – involves performing in-depth technical requirements analysis of the message and the selected framework driven by the Collaboration Partner Agreement (CPA). It is here where business objects become physical with agreed upon XML tagnames, lengths, header information, etc. In addition to the output of the message, maps are published for possible reuse and aligned concept aliases are registered for later reference.

Key to the above is providing the facilitation infrastructure for artifact discovery and navigation and the classification and ontology for the clustering of like terms and to differentiate business terms usage through decomposition. The prime shift components are -- [1] Ontology, [2] Registry, [3] Workflow, and [4] Content management system. The ontology is comprised of various facetted taxonomy views of the business with the capability of defining thesaurus (e.g. synonyms, alias) relationships that reside on a registry. The registry provides reference assistance and stores information about the supporting classifications and metadata artifacts. This occurs independent of them being link references to external artifacts or links to stored artifacts in the content management system(s) and processed workflow. The workflow allows for the status of the enterprise’s value-chain ‘pipelines’ to be analyzed and corrections made quickly. The links and relationships assist the discovery, search, and notification services by providing a mechanism for cooperative actions. Metadata in many cases provides the critical controls and metrics of the enterprise and only together with the ideas above does the enterprise have a holistic solution for integration.

With Business-Centric Methodology, your enterprise can not only take advantage of technology innovations that complement and enhance the architecture, but also provide the environment to foster vendor development of technology that exploits instead of attempting to make obsolete the deployed systems. In short, BCM provides the base for mass customization required - supporting the enterprise’s stakeholders and customers.

Mike Lubash
Mike.Lubash@DFAS.mil