In the article I wrote last September, I gave an example of business information diagramming
that I typically use to describe a business situation and to frame potential
solutions. The diagramming is biased by my background as a linguist and
semanticist. It uses English verbs to designate actions or processes, nouns to
designate people, other objects, concepts and data, and relationships to
designate the roles that the people, concepts, data and people play in the
actions or processes. I get useful insights about information flow and
information lifecycles from these diagrams, and they are easy to present to
both technical and business audiences.
The purpose of this blog entry is to start a discussion in
this community about the kinds of diagrams and other models that you find to be
useful in your work. I’m not looking for tool endorsements. I am looking for
representational ideas and the value that can be derived from them. And, I’d
like to keep the focus on information, as opposed to business processes or
services or capabilities. There are already discussion groups for these other
topics.
I suspect that many of you that do this kind of modeling, do
it informally on pieces of paper or using generic tools like UML or general
purpose diagram editors like Visio. If you have an interesting diagram example,
scan it or turn it into a jpeg and make it a part of your discussion entry.
However, please make sure that you anonymize the diagram or have permission to
publish it. I’ve seen unfortunate things happen when web postings exposed
client intellectual property.
Jim Rhyne
Some recommended reads, discussions...
Business Semantics – Information Alignment
Take Your Visio(r) based Business Process Analysis Project to the Next Level