Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling

A business-modeling effort can have different scopes depending on context and need. Some examples are listed below:

• You may want to build a simple map of the organization and its processes so that you get a better understanding of what the requirements are on the application you are building. In this case, business modeling is a part of the software-engineering project, primarily performed during the inception phase.
• If you are building applications with the primary purpose of managing and presenting information (such as an order management system or a banking system), you may choose to build a model of that information at a business level, without considering the workflows of the business. This is referred to as domain modeling. See Workflow Detail: Domain Modeling. Domain modeling is typically part of the software-engineering project, and performed during the inception and elaboration phases of the project.
• If you are building a "large" system, or a family of applications, you may have one business-modeling effort that will serve as input to several software-engineering projects. The business models will help you find functional requirements, as well as serve as input to building the architecture of the application family. See Concepts: From Business Models to Systems. The business-modeling effort is, in this case, often treated as a project on its own.
• If you are building an application that will be used by several organizations (for example, a sales support application or a billing application), it can be useful to go through a business-modeling effort to align the organizations in how they do their business to avoid requirements that are too complex for the system. Or, if aligning the organizations is not an option, a business-modeling effort can help you understand and manage differences in how the organizations will use the application, and make it easier to determine which application functionality should be prioritized.
• If an organization has decided to start a completely new line of business, and build information systems to support it, a business-modeling effort needs to be performed. In this case, the purpose of business modeling is not only to find requirements on systems, but also to determine the feasibility of the new line of business. The business-modeling effort is, in this case, often treated as a project on its own.
• If an organization has decided to completely revamp their way of doing business (business-process reengineering), business modeling is often one or several projects in its own right. Business-process reengineering is typically done in several stages: envision the new business, reverse-engineer the existing business, forward-engineer the new business, and install the new business.

The business modeling workflow described in the Rational Unified Process is focusing on what is described in the two first bullets. However, the modeling techniques described can be used for all of them.