The Essential Project Forum

Hi,

I was wondering if you could give me an idea of how your meta model domains are interconnected. IE. How are is business connected to application and how is application connected to information, etc? For example, are business capabilities linked to business processes, etc. Appreciate the insight.

Gaurav

Hi Gaurav,

You can find a high-level view of how the meta classes are related in the Tutorials. However, these are described by 'layer' (Business, Application, Information, Technology) and are aimed at providing an introduction to the main constructs.

Business Layer Overview
Application Layer Overview
Information Layer Overview
Technology Layer Overview

The Business Layer Overview, for example, will show you how Business Processes realise Business Capabilities.

The meta model has a comprehensive set of relationships between meta classes both within and between the layers. Presenting these is a challenge, as there are so many links between the meta classes, but we are about to deliver some more overview diagrams that explain how, e.g. Applications support Business Processes, Applications operate on Information and so on.

Detailed, hyperlinked documentation of all the meta classes can be found in the Reference Documentation. This provides a detailed, more technical perspective of how everything is linked together if you need that right now.

To give you more of a feel for the sorts of things that you mentioned:
Business Capabilities are realised by Business Processes so that we can understand things like which (and how many) processes are essentially doing the same thing.

Links between Application and Business layers are available to capture how Application Services support Business Processes and Application Providers support Physical Business Processes. There are also links between individual and teams (Actors) in the business layer that own, support, etc. Application Providers.

Links exist between Business Processes and Information to capture how the information is used by the processes. Similar links are also managed between the Application and Information layers to capture applications that read, write etc. information.

Both Application and Information meta classes are separately linked to the Technology layer to capture things like the technology requirements of an application, technical architectures of applications, the technology used to store information and the dependencies between them all.

If there are particular areas that you'd like some more information on right now, please let us know in here and we'd be happy to describe it.

Jonathan

The Meta-Model diagrams are great. They really help map out how things are interconnected. However, I have noticed that the interconnects between models are not consistent. For example, the links between the Business and Information architectures show differently in the Business Architecture Meta Model and the Information Architecture Meta-Model. Are there updated diagrams?

Hi,

I'm glad you like the diagrams, we felt they would be really useful to try to explain the meta model. We first looked at trying to show everything but we found it impossible without making the diagrams overly complex. What we have done, therefore, is to show a series of simplified views from a number of perspectives. In addition, some of the links are bi-directional and some are not. Initially we tried to represent this with different colours but again, it made the diagrams very busy and so we decided just to show the relevant links in each view. This may, therefore, appear as inconsistencies but, in the example you have given, the link between Business Domain and Information Concept is shown in both diagrams as it is a bi-directional link whereas the link between Actor and Information Store is not bi-directional therefore it is only shown in the information diagram.

I hope this sheds some light on the situation. If you have any other queries please let me know.

Sarah
The Essential Project Team