Universal Acceptance

Look beyond unfamiliar words to see a better description of your business

Today, models are available that you can use to jumpstart your modeling effort. Why start from scratch, when a starter model exists? Some model developers, such as David Hays, Len Silverson, Bill Inmon, and William Fowler, have published many of their models in books. Larger corporations, such as IBM and NCR, have built entire lines of businesses around their models, with a price that reflects that commitment.

Models are available to meet your budget, from the price of a book to hundreds of thousands of dollars. With so much intellectual capital invested by the architects of these models, wouldn't your organization benefit from using one?

The criticism I hear most often is that these models are too abstract. They don't use the terms of your organization. Often, they don't even use the standard terminology of your industry. If I had a dollar for every time I heard "I can't read my company in this model," I'd be rich.

The beauty of a universal model is its independence of any specific company or industry. These models represent what it takes to be a business, any business. The terms used are universal to any community engaged in the exchange of goods and services. If you were to model what is taught in business schools, you'd end up with something that looks a lot like one of these models. In fact, completely different groups of people engaged in the modeling process, completely independently of one another, have all emerged with amazingly similar data models. There must be some sort of truth lurking behind these models.

Just as a thorough understanding of fundamental business concepts helps you better engage in business, it also supports the information structures that underlie any business. Since universal models are grounded in the basic architecture of any business, they can be readily adapted to almost any organization.

For example, Table 1 provides a list of fundamental business concepts that exist in almost any successful business. Although the terms may differ a little among models, the same business concepts pop up in almost every universal model. So you may find Interested Party, Involved Party, or simply Party used instead of Business Party. Others prefer the term Location, Address, or Geography for what I call Locator. What's important is not the term, but the concept as expressed through the definition.

You probably don't see the terms that your organization or industry uses for these business concepts. To use the universal model effectively, you must inventory your own business concepts and map your vocabulary into the fundamental business concepts. Table 2 provides such a mapping for the terms found in the EU-Rent case study from the Business Rules Group's initial paper, "Defining Business Rules - What Are They Really?"

Interesting insights emerge when you map your terms into these business concepts. Most organizations realize that they don't have a term that means "a person or organization." We have a universal business concept for which no one has taken the time to assign a term ... which is why terms like Business Party get invented.

What's more interesting is that information that really is about a specific person or organization is buried behind the role that those business parties can assume (such as renter, branch, branch manager, or loyalty program member). Have you ever wondered why you have to keep filling out your name and address on so many forms when you do business with the same organization? It may be because we've built our business processes around the roles that business parties play, not around the business party. Thus, we have our first source of redundant data: the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the people and organizations with which we do business.

We can also see that many of our terms really represent events that occur during the life of a sales transaction. For EU-Rent, the sale starts with a reservation event that creates the basic terms and conditions of the car rental request (who wants to rent the car, when they want to pick it up and return it, what class of car they want to reserve, what discounts are available, and the expected price for the rental).

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The rental agreement is not legally binding yet. It's possible that the prospective renter won't show up or that EU-Rent will not have the requested car class on hand. The rental agreement represents the intent to execute an actual car rental under the terms specified at the time of the reservation, but neither side can be forced to abide by those terms.

When the renter shows up to pick up the reserved car, the rental agreement is completed by identifying the specific car assigned to the customer, including any additional options the customer has selected, such as insurance coverage, and calculating the expected rental fees. When the customer signs the contract documentation, the agreement becomes legally binding. However, the sales event is not complete until the renter returns the car and pays for the services EU-Rent provided. The sales event is actually a major event that involves a series of subevents: the reservation, the rental, and the return.

This column rebutted the initial objections many MIS workers have to universal models. My next column will build on this foundation by discussing in greater detail the advantages of using a universal model.

Terry Moriarty [terry@inastrol.com] is president of Inastrol, a Southern Calif.-based information management consultancy that specializes in a business rules-based approach to customer relationship management and metadata management.

RESOURCES

Related Article at IntelligentEnterprise.com:

"Business Rules Are Happenin'," (February 16, 2001): www.intelligententerprise.com/010216/metaprise.jhtml