Business Models

This section is about business models.

Dragon1 defines a business model as a related set of entities showing how an organization produces and provides products and services in return for value, like money.

The target of creating, comparing, and communicating a future state and current state business model is to improve the way the organization produces and provides products and services and to increase the value of earnings from it.

Business Model Building Blocks

Dragon1 recognizes five main building blocks for a business model:

Products, Services, and Formula Model
Business Functions and Processes Model
Organizations and Roles Model
Revenue Streams and Earnings Model
Growth Model

These models combined deliver an overall business model. And that can be visualized with different views for the various stakeholders.

Why Enterprise Architects Create Business Models

Enterprise Architects are designers of total concepts for organizations. And to design the best total concept, you need to know the current state and future state business model.

Architects should always, for analysis purposes create a diagram of the business model themselves of an organization, even if there is already a diagram available.

Architects will often learn to understand the model much better with it and ask more questions about it, they can create specific stakeholder views of it to discuss with the stakeholders and practice has shown they will find and see things that were not seen before.

Not having a current and or future state diagram of the business model (regardless of its workflow status), means you do have not a clear communicable picture of the business model of the organization you are designing a total concept for. That means you cannot objectively argue why your solution fits or improves the business model.