I believe it’s being referred to elsewhere as corporate memory. In essence, if your key staff were to leave, would their knowledge of what the business does, and why and how it does it be retained in a useful medium?

I’m sure that in these somewhat unsure times, more companies should be looking to capture that knowledge, and standards such as the business motivation model and business process modeling notation, often coupled with some support from tools such as Select Architect, are key to that discovery and capture process.

Appreciating that the outsourcing of development of systems is now accepted, I believe he was trying to point out the difference between that activity, and the outsourcing of specific business processes. In particular highlighting how the lessons we’ve learnt from software development outsourcing, in terms of requirements specification (using UML, Word docs or whatever), need to be applied to BP outsourcing too.

The use of business modeling like the BMM (business motivation model) and BPMN (business process modeling notation) standards will help these companies to better define the required processes to their outsourcing partners.

Lets take an exmaple by looking in the trading business of international holdings having companies across the world

Of course BPMN supports modeling analysing sales and purchasing processes of any of the companies process. But what about the processes that help the holding organisation to find out what company within the holding performs best ??

Modeling strategies like “align international pricing” or “tracking company performance figures” can be easily done by using BMM . After identifying and describing strategies, detailed process analysis can be done with BPMN.

So Business Experts will benefit from BMM because the techniques support focussing on the most promising process improvement. This is they way to get to hanging fruits in optimising your organisation performance !