Consider transactions and events as key

When you are trying to make sense of a complex business reality, the choice of natural-language concepts to include in your model can be bewildering. Even if you apply the principle of letting business rules do the talking, you will encounter so many nouns and verbs that you can hardly create a concept for each of them.

A good place to start are business-critical transactions. They are moments of transition when buyers commit to buying and suppliers commit to delivery, but also in a wider sense when suppliers commit to having offered something in a certain way, or clients state that they accept a delivery.

Transactions lead to all kinds of communication acts, such as e-mails. These are perhaps less crucial but still central to good business conduct. You can have business rules about communication.

Communication, in turn, leads to data being accumulated, stored and retrieved. You can have rules about data, too. They are important, but should be qualified as indirectly important.

USoft borrows the technique of focusing primarily on crucial transactions from Enterprise Ontology.

Here are just a few examples of the type of verb concept that qualifies as key, as not-to-be-missed:

Here are a few themes and concerns that qualify as possibly relevant, but less important:

• Registration, administration, data structures, technical implementations
• Underlying legislation, external regulations, internal high-level policies
• Excessive categorisation of people, objects, dates...