The Business Reference Model (BRM) is one of the Reference Models of the IndEA Framework (#IndEA) (#IndEAPRM) and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (#FEAF) (#FEAFPRM).
The BRM is pivotal for the design of a good Enterprise Architecture, in so far as it looks at purely the business vision and the functions/services required to fulfil that vision but not the technologies required to be used. The key entity in BRM is Service, be it customer-facing or internal. The watchwords of BRM are – Service Portfolio, Citizen/Business-centricity, Service Prioritization and Integration. A successful implementation of BRM requires a fundamental re-engineering of the Business Processes, elimination of non-value-adds and above all, identification of services that are common across the Government or across groups of departments and abstracting them to a combination of uniform processes and workflows.
Business landscape of IndEA
(And of Societal architecture.)
With a view to give a concrete shape to the BRM, the Group attempted an identification of the 16 vertical domains and 12 horizontal functions, which, together, represent most of what a Government does.
An aspirational goal of IndEA is to support the concept of ‘ONE Government’ with a single interface offered to the citizens, hiding the boundaries of government agencies.
The foregoing model represents the master set of domains and functions. It is always better to define the
scope to be more manageable, by limiting the initial phase of the initiative to less than 10 Verticals and 6 horizontals.
Primary Sector Vertical drilled down
An indicative drill-down of the primary sector represented in Figure 4.8 shows that it has at least 10 sub verticals (each administered by a separate department / agency) and 8 functional areas (each supported by possibly by an application module). There could thus be up to 80 modules, derived basically from 8 common modules, thus drastically cutting the development and maintenance effort – by 72 modules. When we extrapolate the same across the entire Landscape, the saving could be well over a thousand modules.
Design of the Business Landscape provides a granular view of the Enterprise and enables the sponsors to get a view of the breadth of the Service canvas. It also an opportunity to Enterprise Architect to optimize its operations taking a holistic view of the entire Enterprise.
Financial Management (Horizontal) drilled down
Business Process Re-Engineering
Business Process Re-engineering or BPR ‘is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed’. The following are the basic principles of BPR
- Organize around outcomes, not tasks.
- Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.
- Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information.
- Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.
- Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results.
- Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.
- Capture information once and at the source.
The IndEA framework, which aims to transform the domain of Governance, recognizes the critical role of BPR, both at the design stage and the implementation stage of any EA initiative.
Approach to ONE Government
In the context of ONE Government, the following suggestions are provided for the consideration of the Enterprise Architects, embarking on an EA initiative:
- Services may be redesigned taking a whole-of-government view, disregarding the departmental barriers. Common, integrated and multipurpose forms may be designed in a similar manner.
- Information Systems may be designed taking the Government as a single enterprise or a group of sectors, again disregarding the departmental boundaries.
- Virtual institutions may be created to take decisions that, in the normal course, would have to go through multiple agencies.
- Decouple processes and services, such that a process may be used by multiple processes and a service may depend on multiple processes. Principles of orchestration and choreography will have to be used for achieving desired results more efficiently, despite and on account of such decoupling.
- Decouple processes and departments, such that a process may be used by multiple departments and a department may use multiple processes.
- A Public Service Lake may be created, which enables slicing and dicing of services to meet the needs of a life-cycle approach or event-driven approach to the availing of public services by the citizens.
- Cadres of multipurpose case workers may be developed so as to optimize the utilization of human resources at the field level.
It necessarily involves the breaking of the departmental silos. Since it is not practically feasible to break the silos physically, this laudable objective is sought to be achieved by breaking them virtually, through the new concept of Virtualization of Departments.
Source: The IndEA Framework V1.0 document (IndEA Framework).
Further reading: Business Reference Model (BRM) (CIO Wiki)
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