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Business Atoms Any resource in digital media can be made available anywhere. In these years a vision comes into being for future organizations and processes in which any piece of business is composed from a number of smaller business pieces. And each piece of business has a digital interface proclaiming and offering in a harmonized way the its business service. "Business atom" may be a suitable term for such a piece of digital business, having the properties of a micro enterprise and a component that will function in collaboration with thousands of other components in a combined business system. A business atom may deliver a certain type of fighter plane. Another may measure the quality of a piece of cable to be mounted within the very same fighter plane. In each case the service to be expected is well defined. Business atoms - services oriented architecture, semantic web, BMI-DTF The vision is based on the fact that IT is close to being THE business system for many organizations. A lot of customer contact takes place over the internet and is registered digitally. The same is the case for physical letters as they are scanned into the document management system. Customer field support as it has been registered by a bar code reader or entered into the portable digital unit. But behind the scenes of modern IT system a state of chaos exists. Connections between systems have been established in the form of incomprehensible pieces of code deep within each system, or by the replication of data from the databases of one system into the database of others. When the day comes to make a change in business, the IT department or external IT vendor provides you with a bill that may defect the business case of the venture. Therefore a new approach to IT development is happening where IT systems are reduced in scope to fit with proper business activities and are provied with interfaces that communicate in a transparent business language the services carried out by the system and the services it depends upon from other systems. IT people uses the term 'Services Oriented Architecture' (SOA) to describe this philosophy where each service is an independant and reusable business atom. Similarly the internet of the future is envisioned as an intelligent network, a 'Semantic Web' that understands the content of the communication. The language that will make digital business atoms cooperate in an infinite number of business systems is being formulated in the global Business Modelling and Integration Domain Task Force (BMI-DTF). To an increasing extent the IT market delivers product suites that enable processes, activities and services to be developed or reshaped into 'lego-bricks' that can combined freely into runtime business solutions. 
Business modellering - qualities, processes, information The modelling of a piece a business for the design of business atoms starts with that which the business is to deliver: Its quality. Regardsless is en entire process, an activity or a basic service is in focus, the quality goals of this business atom must be clear and precise. The model for quality may depart from e.g. EFQM, SixSigma, Balanced ScoreCard, etc. These are examples of quality goals:
When the goals of quality are made clear the business organization models those business atoms that are needed to deliver this quality. It may be a whole process that handles a business object (a "thing") until it has been brought into the condition or state that is represented by the quality goal of the process. It may also be an activity, i.e. a part of a process that brings the business object from one important state to the next. Or it may be a service, a part of an activity, carried out by IT infrastructure or by a human. It is of critical importance that the scope of processes, activities and services are defined with a robustness that enable them to be utilized in several processes unchanged, and to be changed without changing the prosesses in which they are consumed. There must be no uncertainty concerning the service to be delivered by the business atom, the information that is needed to do it, and which information to receive as a result of the service. Therefore the business organization must model the information that is to be handled by processes, activities and services into a single combined information model covering all levels of business atoms, from processes to services. The modellering departs from a brainstorm that registers any object and piece of information needed for the set of business atoms involved. Then the relationships among each pair of related informations are described - e.g. a person who owns a motor vehicle. And the attributes are listed for each piece of information. This enables a universal language for and access to the information being used by the business atom through its service interface. For any type of modellering it is important that it is made consistent with modelling in previous projects and at all related business domains. Equally, any change of business atoms must include remodelling for the new services to be offered with transparent quality goals - or it will be costly to join business atoms with existing ones. The modellering is not descriptice documentation - as was the case in stand-alone solutions of previous times - it is the foundation for runtime operation of the digital business infrastructure, in the language of business. Processes and their breakdown into activities may be modelled in the BPMN notation that they may be executed runtime wise in BPEL. Activities and their decomposition into services maay be modelled in UML use case diagram. Information can be modelled in UML class diagram. The BMI-DTF initiative could lead to a new combined notation incorporating all levels of business atoms. The interfaces of IT systems are harmonized towards the business infrastructure When the business organization has modelled the digital business atoms to be operated in runtime, it is the job of the IT organization to deliver the digital implementation. It consists partly of interface components on the common business (integration) infrastructure that correspond to the model, partly of the primary processing capacity in an number of underlying base systems. The operations of the base systems that are relevant for the business atoms are transformed bit by bit that the infrastructure may involve them in the operation of business atoms - processes, activities and services. More specifically the transformation includes protocols for communication, formats for information exchange, and the semantic understanding of the information - making any resource emerge on the business infrastructure in the common language of business, delivered through harmonized protocols and formats. Traditional queries, file transports and replication of 'data' among systems has been closed down and replaced by requests through the infrastructure for business services, in the language of business. The dark and mysterious swamp of incomprehensible 'information technology' has been transformed into a transparent digital business system. Sources - recommended reading Ron Sanchez (2007): Modularity, Strategic Flexibility, and Knowledge Management. Oxford University Press. Oliver E. Williamson (1985): The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting, The Free Press. Michael E. Porter (1980): Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, The Free Press. Gartner Consulting (2005): Enterprise Architecture. |