Business Functions

The Business Functions consist of vocabulary content to provide an enterprise-wide view of activities. The Business Functions identify and define the functions that support the core processing activities of the financial services institutions.

The Business Function modelling principles are:

Abstraction
Decomposition
Hierarchy

The Business Functions provide a hierarchical list of business functions or areas of responsibility that must be managed by the financial services institutions. Functions in this list are normalized and exclusive, which means that each function does not include any aspects of other functions in the list.

The Business Functions abstract from data, organizational structure, lines of business, processes and any other specialized views of the enterprise. The Business Functions are defined independently from organizational structure or lines of business.

The Business Functions define functions that:

Have a structure that is independent of product or organization, thereby facilitating a faster response to new market, product, or organization needs

Are consistent across lines of business and functional areas. These common functions reduce training requirements and facilitate the move toward a single point-of-contact for client services across all products

Reference a full data model that reduces data inconsistency and redundancy, thereby providing the foundation for increased data integrity

Complement, but exist separately from, a set of process-oriented models, comprising the Business Functions Activities and Verbs, which detail the activities that support the functions.

There is minimal duplication of functions, thereby the Business Functions provide a basis for the development of applications in which:

Reducing the application development effort by avoiding the need to write the same or similar functions many times

Reducing the application maintenance effort that is required to support the increasing rate of change in the business by minimizing the extent of application changes

Minimizing the potential for inconsistent processing within the company.
- The Business Functions vocabulary content comprises 4 parts:
- All Activities
- All Functions
- All Triggers
- All Verbs

All Activities
All Activities contain common, generic, non-redundant activities that can be reused across enterprise business operations. An Activity is an action that is performed by the financial service institution to satisfy a business requirement.
All Functions
All Functions contain a functional decomposition of the financial services business. It is organized as a term hierarchy with several levels, and the lowest level mapped from the processes or global tasks in the APM. The global tasks are the basic building blocks that constitute process flows. Note that a given global task is only mapped once within terms in All Functions, even though it can be reused within multiple processes.
All Triggers
A Trigger is a stimulus or incident that initiates one or more Activities (input Trigger). Triggers are also used to model the effect of what happened when an Activity is completed (output Trigger). A Trigger initiates An Activity.
All Verbs
A Verb is a prediction of action on some object of interest to the financial services institution. Verbs are used to name processes, tasks and services, which are always named using a combination of a Verb and noun phrase.
Mapping to Analysis Process Model
A function as defined in Business Functions, is an ongoing operation that requires management oversight and supports one aspect of furthering the mission of the enterprise. It is named using a noun or, more typically, a compound noun, such as Party management. The Business Functions are thus a static representation of the business of a financial institution, irrespective of how it is transacted at any particular time.
Using Business Functions
This topic describes using the Business Functions.

Parent topic: Vocabulary