Putting Sanity Back in Business

I love models... and I'm not referring to the icons representing our cultural preferences in human vanity. Rather, I'm in love with visuals that portray a rich coalescence of principles and depict in shocking clarity how things interrelate.

One such model I revisited lately is the BMM, the Business Motivation Model. A simplified version is shown below:


The BMM brings sanity to business by addressing two fundamental questions:
  1. What do we need to do?
  2. Why do we do what we do?
Using a practical and comprehensive framework it allows business planning to adapt strategically in a cohesive and efficient manner. As the BMM Specification states:

The Business Motivation Model provides a scheme or structure for developing, communicating, and managing business plans in an organized manner. Specifically, the Business Motivation Model does all of the following:
  • It identifies factors that motivate the establishing of business plans.
  • It identifies and defines the elements of business plans.
  • It indicates how all these factors and elements inter-relate.
Among these elements are ones that provide governance for and guidance to the business — Business Policies and Business Rules.
(The Business Motivational Model, Release 1.3, September 2007)
You can get the full specification of the BMM from the BRG Website. It has also been adopted by the OMG, the organization responsible for managing and promoting standards such as UML.

The BMM is an essential tool for tackling the challenges in of dramatic change and business volatility. Re-use this wisdom to drive a little more sanity in your environment while continuing to align your intuition with solid business principles.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I really believe that BMM can provide significant value to businesses. We've been promoting BMM for a while, and over the last 12 months have been developing BMM modeling products to show that this value can be achieved in real commercial situations (www.xactium.com).
Howard Lenos said…
Thanks Andy, interesting, will have to take a closer look at your modeling tools..

Popular posts from this blog

The 90-9-1 Rule

Measuring Collaboration

Superstar Productivity in the Cloud