Business modeling discipline at Ishi is centered around Project Vision, Domain Modeling, Process Modeling and Rules Modeling. This ensures that the system to be delivered fits into and supports the business processes and strategy.

Domain Object Model

We model domain entities around real business situations, devoid of any software artifacts. In lightweight projects, we use domain models as visual dictionaries for the design activities. It also serves as a Business Object Model as we encode all the conceptual entities, their attributes and associations. It serves as an excellent bridge between business users, architects and designers. We derive detailed designs and data model from the Domain Object Model.

Business Process Model

We analyze the business processes to model how things get done. It consists of identifying process definitions, process instances, participants, activities, activity owners and the job owner. Each activity is classified as manual or automated and the role associated to each activity is also determined. Process optimization can be initiated at this point.

Domain Rules Model

We model Domain Rules to capture constraints or policies of the business. Domain Rules can be created from scratch or reverse-engineered from existing enterprise systems. We document the domain rules in a common syntax explaining the individual entities of the rule expression. We work with business analysts and users to model business policies and guidelines as sets of interrelated domain rules. It has benefited our clients by:

• Providing a centralized catalog of business rules for use case analysis, application design and development
• Presenting an opportunity to separate rules from the application logic using commercially available rules engines

Inception Workflows

• Inception is driven by Project Vision and Business Objectives
• The business problem is defined and high level solution is envisioned during Inception
• We conduct the first requirements workshop or meetings with business users to model domain objects and the business process
• We do feasibility studies to assist our clients in Build vs. Buy decisions
• Inception is focused on building the right thing vs. building it right