Business Interaction Model

The Business Interaction Model defines six interactions between the customer and the "System". The Model is a graphical depiction of the interactions of the Customer with the System, the applications within the System, and the System's interactions with external Suppliers. The key contribution of the BIM is the "Customer Interaction Stack":
Recognize the Need/Want
Research Options
Inquiry: Establish Contact, understand offerings, prepare offer
Contractual Phase
Delivery/Fulfillment
Completion: Audit, appeal, satisfaction assessment.

The point is these six interactions occur whether they are formally recognized or not. The lack of recognition and measurement for each interaction suggests a deficiency in the enterprise's service delivery capability and accomplishment.

For the Business Architecture, we make the hypothesis that a Business Service performs one or more of these six interactions.

We are still looking for clear definitions to distinguish between a business function and a business service.

The Business Interaction Model is a way to discover functions, events, and roles that contribute to needed business process analysis/models, business rules, use cases, and the business architecture.

Introduction to Contributors and the Curious

Welcome to a forum for business architecture practitioners. We will explore essential topics in business architecture: what is it, what are the methodologies and frameworks, best practices, experiences, lessons learned, relationship to enterprise architecture, contribution to service oriented architecture, and other related subjects you may contribute. You may recommend articles, publications, other blogs, web sites, conferences, and books. Please encourage your colleagues, clients, and consultants to contribute to this site. If you can recommend a better site already in existence, we can simply turn our site into a hyperlink to a better location.