Have you ever wondered why engineers are more trusted than enterprise architects when it comes to building things?
When you stop and think about it, engineers are taught the discipline of the modelling required to create designs. Be it for a road, commercial building, house, plumbing, electrical wiring…the list goes on. There is a standard notation that is used to communicate the design with those that will build. The models and drawings created go through stringent quality checks and are under the ‘control’ of a quality management system. No one is allowed to start building until the design has been verified and released to the builder.
So why is it in business modelling, that we do not follow a standard modelling notation. Why is it when a standard modelling language exists, we choose to bastardise it with our unique flavour so it immediately becomes non-standard and loses the quality characteristics of the standard?
I’ve known about the problem for many years now. When I worked for the Queensland Government Chief Information Office, I successfully introduced BPMN as the recommended business process modelling language. I did this because I could see the enormous waste of taxpayers’ money because every consultant and business analyst used their own flavour of modelling notations.
What’s wrong with that, I hear you say. Well think about, do you work in a company where people speak different languages every time you gather in a meeting room or have a workshop? Would you understand the people in the room if you have six different languages spoken? Would you spend time hiring an interpreter of each language to translate every person in the room, six different times. That’s six interpreters in the room!
Every time you use a non-standard business modelling notation; you must teach the people in the room how to read your uniquely flavoured model. So, you spend half your workshop teaching them and the rest getting some hopefully, productive work done. Then the poor people in the room must try and figure out how your model lines up with the previous consultant’s work and their own mental model of how business flows. You still can’t see a problem with that?
You are done with the workshop to gather requirements, but you still haven’t handed over those requirements to the builders. Here is another bunch of people who you now have to familiarise with your unique models so that they build the darn thing right. How well do you think that’s going to go and how frustrating do you think it is for the builders to understand what you meant by the squiggly lines you used to indicate a business rule?!
The Object Management Group have been managing specifications for years. I know this because I have used them in my practice and made my teams learn the standards and how to apply them in practice. Just in business modelling specifications alone, there are 18 standards.
Source: https://www.omg.org/spec/
I can hear all your groans from here. I’m going to tell you this…if you don’t invest in being more disciplined in business modelling, and choose to avoid using standard notations to describe the things in business, please don’t be surprised if the practice maturity and respect for enterprise architecture work doesn’t improve.
Watch out for my next article on a business modelling framework for describing an organisation from strategy through to execution.
