Enterprise Business Context Diagram - Foundational Business Architecture Artifact

We are all connected in sharing a common goal and purpose in life.  All of us want the same thing in life - be happy, help others, give something back to the world, be healthy, raise great children, learn new things, just spread positive energy and hope, etc.  If you see the commonalities in each other, life is pretty simple.

Unfortunately, the world we live in seems complex but it is really not if we focus on the commonalities and shared vision.  Why is this type of philosophical attitude so important to inspire and generate positive energy to solve complex problems.  It is because through keen observation of how the world we live in operates, we can tap into each others' synergies and strengths to make each others' weaknesses slowly disappear and realize the equation, 1 + 1 = 3.

In the earlier post, Technology Innovation Bridge, we briefly touched upon how technology innovations can break the problem boundaries across industry verticals via common solutions.  There are umpteen ways to recognize the similarities and common problem patterns to compound the value of technology innovations.  Below is one of the techniques I found immensely helpful to quickly understand how an enterprise works from "outside-in" view.  This technique is called "Enterprise Business Context Diagram (EBCD)".  

Once, you develop an EBCD for a company, you quickly can develop the same for another company in another industry vertical without much effort.  This is because, once you develop EBCDs for two or three companies you worked so far, quickly you will realize many of the profit-making corporations in the world have more similarities than one would think without keen observation.

Enterprise Business Context Diagram as a One Page Visual Tool to Recognize the Commonalities in Enterprises Across Industry Verticals
Developing EBCD is simple and easy.  Below are the steps to produce EBCD.
1.  Create a box in the middle of the paper, to model the enterprise you are working for.
2.  Then show all "external enterprise actors - people and entities that influence how an enterprise works" around this box.
Below is the sample EBCD that should be applicable to most of the enterprises across all of the industry verticals in this world.

Business Architecture - EBCD is the First Foundational Artifact 
All of us in the Information Technology (IT) industry know that "to deliver effective IT solutions for business problems, we need to first understand the business problem from big picture sense".  To get a handle on this business problem, we develop Business Architecture first before developing Solution Architecture.  I found EBCD as the first business architecture artifact that is useful to achieve the following purposes (there are many, but below are just few samples of usage):

• Understand all the external business actors influencing how an enterprise works
• Use EBCD as one of the simple and powerful communication vehicles to establish working relationship with your coworkers with a shared goal of correcting and completing this one page visual picture to quickly uncover all business actors - thereby elevating the combined value you and your coworkers bring to the company
• EBCD serves as a basis to develop "Business Interaction Inventory (BII)" for each of the "External Actor" listed in EBCD.  Each interaction captured will lead to identification of "business use cases and opportunities for improvement" to enrich the interaction experience not just for the "external business actor" but also "internal enterprise employees".

The above "BII" will trigger so many other supporting business architecture related artifacts like the following (that elaborate several other aspects in support of realizing and implementing the EBCD):

1. Business Operating Model (Products/Services, Channels, etc.)
2. Business Processes (typically four levels, Level 1, 2, 3, 4)
3. Business Functional Domains
4. Business Information Model and Information Flows
5. Business Use Case Diagrams
6. Business Capability Models (typically four levels, Level 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Power of EBCD to Surface Common Business Problems and Solutions - thereby Breaking the Boundaries of Technology Innovation Across Industry Verticals

Solutions that we come up with one industry vertical to provide services to "Customers" or market products/services to "Customers" are applicable to other industry verticals.  Example: Use of Salesforce.com to support "Customer Service and Marketing" across industry verticals.

Solutions that we use in one industry vertical to interact with "Regulators" are applicable to serve other industry verticals for similar problem domain.  

Solutions that we use in one industry vertical to interact with "Distributors" are applicable to serve other industry verticals for similar problem domain. 

Solutions that we use in one industry vertical to interact with "Strategic Business Partners" are applicable to serve other industry verticals for similar problem domain. 

You get the idea.  As we develop solutions to address and improve business interactions and touch-points with each "external actor type", we can adapt these solutions across industry verticals.

How do we continue this conversation?

Are there examples like Salesforce.com quoted above that are applicable across industry verticals to serve various types of "business actors" as shown in the EBCD picture above?  

Appreciate sharing your knowledge-base by posting your feedback to this post. Remember the equation, 1 + 1 = 3.