The approach to creating the business architecture for NIH emphasizes improving the discussion between business owners, subject matter experts, and the IT staff. It does this by offering a series of simple, graphical models and questions about those models that will elicit the information required to describe the business. These models are deceptively simple so that they are clear to the people who make the business work, yet, at the same time, capture a quite complex set of facts about the business. The Business Process Modeling NIHRFC defines the process for submitting business models to the Ofiice of the Chief IT Architect of the NIH when a request is made to invest in an IT project or update an existing system that is or will be subject to both the NIH EA and the CPIC policy and procedures.
Modeling Dimensions
These models consists of five distinct "dimensions" that identify individual elements of the business process. They are:
- What -- the activities that are done to accomplish the purpose identified for the business process. The list will include everything required to accomplish the purpose even if a given element is only used occasionally. The set of elements is constructed hierarchically just as a work break down structure for a project plan.
- Who -- the participants of the process. Participants are divided into four groups: people (i.e., specific individuals), organizations, roles (e.g., Receivables Clerk), and IT applications (e.g., eRA or NIH Business System). The model supports relationships between each of the elements to recognize such things as organization or reporting structures.
- Where -- the location of activities. In this dimension the model supports relationships between the elements so that information such as distance or travel time between location may be incorporated if it is relevant.
- When -- the timing of the business process. This dimension captures the relationship between various time factors of the business.
- Which -- the data and artifacts that support the business. This dimension records the information that the business keeps about itself and the various forms in which it is displayed and manipulated.
Once models for these five dimensions have been developed, they are assembled into a process flow (How Model) that sequences the activities, establishes the decisions that control branches in the process, specify who performs each element, which pieces of information are used, where the work is done, and when it is performed.
