My drop in the huge ocean of CBM.ai!

As an enterprise strategy consultant, I frequently get drawn into leading complex engagements with clients, who may belong to a different industry than what I have had experience working with. Over the years, I have become a huge fan of IBM's Component Business Modeling (CBM) that helps me get started every single time!

CBM is a multi-patented framework for modeling and analyzing a business for the purpose of organizing and grouping business activities into basic building blocks of a business called business components. The business components have underlying processes and associated metrics. It is a framework that can help organizations evaluate strategic priorities and identify opportunities for transformation.

However, on a recent client engagement, I sorely missed a CBM map for that industry. The client had businesses in media and events management across multiple revenue streams. The complexity of the organization and the adopted processes was challenging to understand without having a baseline that I relied upon... the CBM. The engagement was successful and we were able to create a detailed process model. I decided to make it easy for anyone else who finds themself in my shoes by harvesting the process model.

And hence ensued a meticulously detailed and long process to create a new CBM. It was not just a matter of translating an excel or presentation to a digital format. It was to create an "Enterprise-on-a-page" that shows core and non-core commonalities and synergies, integration and fragmentation, and consistency. Finally, this month, I published my first CBM model. It did not feel less than any other accomplishment. Especially because the model was already bringing benefits by being a baseline for other use cases, namely GenAI.

I see huge potential in the way CBM is being developed. The latest use case is CBM for sustainability, that combines CBM with technology from IBM acquisitions and our business partners.

I am a CBM fan! :-)