Knowledge Function Modeling

The Knowledge Function Model is a concept of Enterprise Architects where Business Functions can be used in the design phase to enrich them with business logic and logical services, besides the possibility to add functional knowledge concerning the architecture, the action of design components to make them executable (DME or Direct Model Execution) during modeling, and augmented knowledge to add tacit functional knowledge made explicit to each elementary business function.

Problems and Solutions

During the IT design and development processes often no references are made to business functions. This may lead to omissions and problems concerning:

1. Omissions of defining the relationships between components within the architectural continuum
2. Inabilities to correctly define the relationships between components in design models and the design continuum
3. Inabilities to correctly maintain and reuse the correct components during the design process, resulting in duplicate definitions and incorrect use of the correct components
4. Burning time, money and quality during the transition process and
5. Resulting in more complex maintainable legacy
6. During operations understanding the applications, apps and business processes is hard to learn.

Tools to support Knowledge Function Management

The following tools support the Knowledge Function Management:

Advantages of the Enterprise Architects approach

Modeling according to the Enterprise Architects approach leads to enriching the Knowledge Functions with Business Logic and Services. The services are generated after mapping the necessary attributes of Business Objects to attributes for the User Interaction (Presentation Services) and Data Objects (Information Services and Data Services) and then used in the so-called microflow of the Knowledge Function. Next, the Business RuleSets defining the problem-related business logic, and the sequential handling of services and rulesets are modeled via the microflow. Thus, the Knowledge Function becomes executable and the architectural and actionable functional knowledge of the business function is automatically defined.

Next, Business Processes can be modeled by thread the actionable Knowledge Functions at the elementary level (OTOPOP or One Time, One Place, One Person) into flows of executable activities stringed together with Process logic. In this way the architectural and actionable Knowledge of the process is also automatically defined.

To ensure operation of processes and apps is performed well it is possible to enrich the Knowledge Functions and the Business Process with augmented knowledge telling the users how the functionalities should be used and delivering extra functional knowledge. This extra functional knowledge or Augmented Knowledge consists of documentation, audio and video material, models, etc. telling the user how the Knowledge Function should be performed as an process activity, app or application.

Besides this manually added augmented knowledge during the design also per window extra features in the form of Wiki-pages are generated automatically that explain

1. The meta data definition of each window attribute, the constraints on these attributes, etc., so that functional management can add extra information in an easy way
2. The architectural information concerning the coherence of the window, the app or activity, the used business objects, the business rulesets in use, etc.
3. The SAFe™ Core Values are safeguarded and improved as follows
4. a. Alignment
5. b. Built-in Quality
6. c. Transparency
7. d. Program Execution