Business Modeling: A Practical Guide to Realizing Business Value

As business modeling becomes mainstream, every year more and more companies and government agencies are creating models of their businesses. But creating good business models is not a simple endeavor. Business modeling requires new skills.

Written by two business modeling experts, this book shows you how to make your business modeling efforts successful. It provides in-depth coverage of each of the four distinct business modeling disciplines, helping you master them all and understand how to effectively combine them. It also details best practices for working with subject matter experts. And it shows how to develop models, and then analyze, simulate, and deploy them. This is essential, authoritative information that will put you miles ahead of everyone who continues to approach business modeling haphazardly.

• Provides in-depth coverage of the four business modeling disciplines: process modeling, motivation modeling, organization modeling, and rules modeling.
• Offers guidance on how to work effectively with subject matter experts and how to run business modeling workshops.
• Details today's best practices for building effective business models, and describes common mistakes that should be avoided.
• Describes standards for each business modeling discipline.
• Explains how to analyze, simulate, and deploy business models.
• Includes examples both from the authors' work with clients and from a single running example that spans the book.

About the Authors

Dave Bridgeland is currently CTO of Unisys Global Business Transformation. He has work with business modeling and simulation since 1987, and has led business modeling teams and projects at Coopers & Lybrand Consulting, KPMG, and Unisys, and has served as VP of a business modeling tools startup. Dave has created business models for many organizations, including government agencies, financial services companies, telecommunications companies, energy companies, and healthcare organizations.

Ron Zahavi has over 20 experience managing technology and strategy and integrating software and applications to meet business requirements. His expertise includes Distributed Object Technology (DOT), systems architecture, web-based systems, security, and frameworks. Currently Ron is a consulting CIO also in the Unisys Global Business Transformation team. Prior to working at Unisys, Ron was VP of consulting, a CTO and a CIO managing technology across several companies and due diligence of potential acquisitions.