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.