Practice: Use Case Driven Business Modeling
Use Case-Driven Business Modeling (UCDBM) establishes a description of an organization for the purposes of business transformation, business process improvement and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption.
Purpose

The Use Case Driven Business Modeling practice improves consistency and predictability by clearly documenting as-is and to-be business processes with easy-to-follow use case and UML techniques. It improves oversight by assuring the value the business provides is realized by elements within the business. And it improves audit results by providing traceability from the business goals (use cases) to the description of how the business operates (realizations).

Use Case Driven Business Modeling is one of many techniques that contributes to describing or re-engineering a business. Other methods and tools such as Functional Area Analysis, Business Process Modeling, and Component Business Modeling can be used in conjunction with UCDBM to provide additional perspectives of a business. UCDBM is particularly useful to quickly identify business boundaries and interactions, communicate the business functions in a way that's easy to consume, and leverage an organization's existing skills with use case modeling.

A Use Case-driven approach to business modeling is attractive for organizations already familiar with Use Case-Driven development and organizations looking for a technique for describing business requirements and processes that is easy to use and comprehend by non-technical roles.

How to read this practice

Review Effective Business Modeling with UML: Describing Business Use Cases and Realizations and Rational UML Profile for Business Modeling for in-depth information on business use-case modeling.

Consider attending the Business Modeling with the UML course for hands-on instruction with using UML to model business domains.

Additional Information

These are recommended books on using UML and object technologies for business modeling:

  • Business Modeling with UML: Business Patterns at Work, Hans-Erik Eriksson and Magnus Penker, 2000, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Presents a set of valuable patterns for business modeling.
  • The Object Advantage - Business Process Reengineering with Object Technology, Ivar Jacobson, Maria Ericsson, Agneta Jacobson 1994, Addison Wesley Longman. The basis of the Business Modeling discipline, this is the first book that applied object technology to the field of business modeling.
  • Enterprise Modeling with UML, Chris Marshall 2000, Addison Wesley Longman. Describes how to create business models that facilitate the development of software systems.




See the Use-case Driven Business Modeling work breakdown structure to gain an understanding of the ordering and dependencies of tasks within the practice.

Relationships