Business Motivation Model

Introduction

The Business Motivation Model (BMM) is an Object Management Group (OMG) finalized beta specification, which will be published for general use during early 2008.

The BMM is a metamodel that provides a vocabulary for corporate governance and strategic planning. It defines:

Governance and planning concepts, including: strategy, tactic, goal, objective, influencer, assessment, potential impact, business policy, business rule and organizational unit.
Relationships between them, such as “objective is supported by tactic” and “business policy governs strategy”.

With a tool that implements the BMM specification, stakeholders in an enterprise can create a Business Motivation Model for their business (or BMMs for different parts of their business). This will enable them:

To define the components of governance - what the enterprise wants to be (its ends), what it has decided to do to get there (its means), and how it will govern the means it has adopted.
To record decisions made in response to changes in internal and external influencers, to change ends and means, and to reference which parts of the operational business are affected.
To take account of earlier decisions made in response to the same and other related influencers.

A number of commercial BMM tools are available, and others are in production.

The BMM Approach

The idea behind the BMM is that businesses are driven, not by change, but by how they decide to react to change. The BMM is methodology-neutral - it does not say how, for example, assessments or decisions are made - but it does assume the progression illustrated below.

People in the enterprise monitor influencers and decide when the enterprise needs to react to them. Influencers can be external or internal to the enterprise. The BMM provides a default set of categories - external influencers include competition and regulation; internal influencers include infrastructure and corporate values - but a business can also define its own.

An assessment is made when one or more influencers indicate changes that could affect the business. Potential impacts are identified and evaluated in terms of risk and potential reward, and what effects they would have on achievement of ends (vision, goals and objectives) and employment of means (mission, strategies, tactics, business policies and business rules).

A decision is made on how to react to the influencers. This often requires changes to some ends and/or means. These changes have to be carried forward into the operational business. The BMM includes “placeholders” that reference where in the operational business the changes have been, or will be, made. The BMM provides placeholders for referencing Business Processes, Business Rules, Organization Units, Fixed Assets, Resources, and Offerings (products and services).

Using the BMM

The main purpose of a BMM is to reference and connect together those things in a business that are important for governance. There are three parts to this:

Ends and means. Ends define what the enterprise wants to be, the states that it wants to reach - its vision and desired results (goals and objectives). Means are what the enterprise has decided it needs to do in order to reach the ends - its mission and courses of action (strategies and tactics), governed by directives and values (business policies and business rules).
Connecting the means to the parts of the operational business (business processes, organization units, etc.) that realize them.
Documenting assessments made when influencers indicate changes that are significant to the business.

When an influencer indicates a significant change - say, the arrival of a new regulation - the decision makers look into their BMM to ask: “What other regulations and influencers are relevant to this regulation?”, “What ends and means might be affected”, “What assessments and decisions have we made in the past that are relevant to this regulation?”.
Then, when they have made their assessment, their decisions are realized by making changes to ends and means, then making the corresponding operational changes and connecting them back to the assessment, via the ends and means.

When the enterprise is asked how it responded to a change - say, when it has a regulatory compliance audit - it can trace forward from assessment to operational activity. If it is asked to justify why its operations are the way they are, it can trace backwards to the assessments and decisions that determined the operational activity.

Documentation within the BMM is minimal - summary descriptions that can refer to more detailed sources. For example a potential impact (supporting an assessment) might refer to market reports, consultants’ advice, news media, business intelligence from within the enterprise, spreadsheets, simulations - anything that is relevant to defining the potential impact.

The placeholders that refer to the operational business do not have to be a complete, coherent set. Only the relevant ones need be included. It is assumed that completeness and coherency is maintained in the operational systems referenced by the placeholders.

Decisions about what an enterprise does fall into two broad categories: “doing things right” and “doing the right things”. The BMM’s focus is on decisions about doing the right things to achieve the enterprise’s ends. Decisions about doing things right (i.e. about the organization’s carrying out the courses of action as the stakeholders expect) are generally within process optimisation, performance improvement, resource allocation and quality assurance at the operational level.

Application of the BMM

To date, the BMM has been used in several ways with different emphases, including:

Improvement of business transformation activities, by providing access to past decisions and assessments and clarifying the cumulative effects of change.
Enterprise architecture, providing the “big picture” of what enterprise wants to achieve
Regulatory compliance, providing backward and forward traceability between regulation and operational change
Gap analysis, identifying, for example: goals without explicit courses of action, courses of action without measurable objectives, business policies that are not being applied.
Improvement of metrics, providing the rationale behind the numbers in objectives and on balanced scorecards.

Summary

The BMM is a specification that supports business modelling without concerns about the operational detail - manual or IT - of the enterprise. Its only IT aspect is the specification of tools that will support business stakeholders in making decisions about their enterprises.

However, because it is an OMG specification, enterprise BMMs can be transferred between BMM-compliant tools. This capability would support, for example: collaborative development in a trade association on common approaches to some kinds of change (e.g. regulation); distribution of reference models in a federation; interchange of policies and courses of action between partners in a value chain.

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