📕 Business Activity Models (BAM) in Business Analysis

A Business Activity Model (BAM) is a conceptual model that depicts the activities and logical dependencies within an organization from a stakeholder’s perspective. It provides a high-level view of what the organization does and captures the world view of a particular stakeholder. BAMs are used to explore, understand, and develop business requirements.

Initially, there will be one BAM for each business perspective. These will subsequently be overlaid to form a consensus model, possibly covering all relevant perspectives.

The BAM helps in the analysis of the business situation and the identification of improvements. The model is not concerned with who carries out the activities or where they are carried out. They provide a conceptual or idealized view of the organization’s activities.

BAMs differ from Business Process Models (BPMs, for example, BPMN diagrams). BAMs focus on high-level activities and logical dependencies within an organization, while Business Process Models provide a detailed representation of specific workflows and processes within the organization.

All business systems can be described in terms of five types of business activity and the dependencies between them. We use these five activity types as a basis for developing a BAM. These types of activity are: planning activities (strategy decisions incl. staffing); enabling activities (allocate resources); doing activities; monitoring activities; control activities (take control action).

One way of analyzing a BAM is to consider the business events (external events, internal decisions, scheduled points) to which the organization must respond, and the business rules (constraints, procedural rules) that underpin and constrain the business operations. This information is also very useful when redesigning business processes.

Another useful way of approaching BAM construction is to consider the organisation’s Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as an input for BAM activities.

Overall, the use of BAMs can help organizations gain a better understanding of their activities, identify improvement opportunities, and align stakeholders’ perspectives.

Further reading: Chapter 7 of the book “Business Analysis. 2nd ed. by BCS The Chartered Institute for IT”