Guidelines: Important Decisions in Business Modeling

Decide which artifacts to use and how to use each of them. The table below describes which artifacts are mandatory, and which need only be used in some cases. The "tailoring comments" give some guidelines as to how you can tailor each artifact.

For a complete description of each artifact, see Business Modeling Artifacts. For each artifact read the section "Tailoring" where the advantages and disadvantages of that specific artifact are discussed.

Artifact	Tailoring Comments
Business use-case model	Mandatory if you are doing "complete" business modeling, excluded if you do domain modeling.
Business use case	Mandatory if you are doing "complete" business modeling, excluded if you do domain modeling.
Glossary	Mandatory
Supplementary Business Specifications	Mandatory if you are doing "complete" business modeling, excluded if you do domain modeling.
Business Object Model	Mandatory
Business Use-Case Realization	Mandatory if you are doing "complete" business modeling, excluded if you do domain modeling.
Organization Unit	Can be omitted if the organization is small and can be understood without grouping the business workers and entities.
Business Worker	Mandatory if you are doing "complete" business modeling, excluded if you do domain modeling.
Business Entity	Mandatory.

Decide Which Reports to Use

Which "Work" Reports to Use

Decide which reports to use as temporary work reports from which to extract information from the business use-case model and business object model, to make reviewing easier.

Which Reports to Use for Final Documentation

Decide which, if any, reports you want to capture the final results of Business Modeling.

At the end of the project you store the results in a configuration management tool. However, your organization may require that the results are captured on paper. If that is the case, you must decide which reports to use to capture the entire business use-case model and the entire business object model.

If the predefined reports do not suit your needs, tailor the outline of these reports, or create new ones. For each report decide how the report should be used: "To be skipped", "Casual", "Informal", "Formal-Internal", or "Formal-External". For more details, see Activity: Develop Development Case.

Identify Configuration Items

Read about the artifacts in Business Modeling Artifacts, then decide which of the artifacts should be handled as separate configuration items.

If you decide to not handle an artifact as a separate configuration item, then it is recommended that it be part of the enclosing artifact. For example, if you decide to not handle each business use-case package as a separate configuration item; then the business use-case packages should be part of the same configuration item as the business use-case model.

It is up to each individual project to decide what needs to be handled as separate configuration items. When you develop a system incrementally, make sure that you create a baseline at the end of each iteration. In this way, you can control the difference, iteration to iteration.

It is recommended that you clearly separate, in your configuration items, business use case artifacts from business object model artifacts. For example, do not put business use cases, and the corresponding business use-case realizations, in the same configuration item, because they are likely to be updated on different occasions.

It is recommended that all the properties of an artifact be part of the same configuration item as the artifact itself. This means that if a property of an artifact is stored in a separate file from the artifact itself, then these files should be part of the same configuration item.

For example, assume that a business use case is stored in a file of a modeling tool, and its property "Workflow" is stored in an external file. Then the version of the business use case in the modeling tool, and the version of the external file should be controlled together.