Identifying the business motivation behind a project is perhaps even more vital at this time of economic restraint than previously was the case. For decades we’ve striven to raise the bar when it comes to matching the system to the business needs, and when funds are tight we need to work harder to ensure that what we deliver in software will enable our client or employer to pay our wages at the end of the month.

‘Why?’ is perhaps a question which has been insufficiently asked. An interesting thread on the International Institute of Business Analysts blog, provides viewpoints from a range of contributors, and some great graphics highlighting the importance of that question which seems to come so regularly from the lips of toddlers, but which so often we fail to ask once we think we’ve learnt everything and reached the heady wisdom of adulthood.

Claudio Bartolini points out the importance of being able to clearly identify the link between IT systems and the strategic impact they may have. We can model the What and How and When and Where and Who for all we like in our business process or UML models, but without understanding the Why of the major aspects of those systems, and, one might argue, even the detail of those systems, we run the risk of developing systems for the sake of developing systems alone. And surely we won’t be allowed to do that more than once, or maybe twice…

One such example is an independent consultant who also happens to be a motivational coach. Working on a BPM project for a UK-based automative company, he was keen to explore a variety of different notations for business process modeling, but on hearing of BMM was interested to learn more. He has quickly identified the benefit of modeling Ends and Means, and reduced the difference between goal and objective to simply this:

Is it an enduring goal or a targetted objective?

Another group of business analysts at a UK retailer find themselves regularly questioning why certain business processes are required, and equally regularly fail to get a meaningful motivation from their sponsors. They hope to be able to extract this motivation from the business more easily now that they have a model which can link the processes they identify with business strategy, even if they have to come up with the implied strategy themselves in the first instance.

It will be intriguing to see the level of uptake of the business motivation model in the coming months, and whether it will provide that missing link between business sponsor and systems development that so many previous modeling techniques have aimed to create.