Richard's BLOG

Category: IT   Topic: Business Modelling

I'm working on a book describing how Mitchell Horvath and InferData consultants build business models. It's 80% finished, so there's only another 80% to go :-)

Key to the approach is the idea of observational semantics. Instead of asking, for instance, "when a customer withdraws cash, what are the business rules to constrain this piece of behaviour?" we ask "when we observe such-and-such a piece of behaviour, what does the business call what has happened?"

Adopting the observational approach helps to keep you focused on the business to be modelled, and away from software-oriented ideas of the system(s) to be built. We like to be able to focus on the business, rather than the software, whenever we're trying to uncover (or help to design) the rules by which the business runs.

The goal is to have a complete draft of the book to send to a publisher by the end of the (northern hemisphere) winter.