Following the Pattern

Finding the patterns in business party relationships enables positive business change

Terry Moriarty
March 09, 1999, Volume 2 Number 4
 

 The concept of patterns has gained popularity within the object-oriented community as a technique for increasing development productivity through reuse. Architect Christopher Alexander applies the concept of patterns to building and town design. Drawing on his work, proponents of object-oriented design patterns, such as the authors of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley, 1994), say that “design patterns help you to choose design alternatives that make a system reusable and avoid alternatives that compromise reusability.... Put simply, design patterns help a designer get the design ‘right’ faster.”
 

Patterns exist in most engineering disciplines, whether the discipline involves building design, application development, or business analysis. Martin Fowler, author of Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models (Addison-Wesley, 1996), defines a “pattern” as “an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others.” Applying patterns can be just as beneficial to business analysis as to physical design. Within the business analysis domain, the patterns represent the constructs required for a business to operate. There is a long list of business concepts for which patterns exist, including: finance and accounting; business planning; product development; manufacturing and inventory control; sales and marketing; customer service; human resource management; capital asset management; and managing relationships with other business parties such as customers, suppliers, regulators, competitors, and shareholders. Some patterns apply to any organization, regardless of its industry or business endeavor, including not-for-profit and government agencies, and profit-oriented business                     concerns. Additional patterns exist to support specific industries. For example, the patterns for managing customer relationships within the fast food industry are quite different from those in the financial services industry.
 

The dynamic business model provides an integrated set of patterns that you can apply to any business organization. When an organization uses the dynamic business model as its enterprise model, it has a powerful framework for analyzing each business area and achieving an integrated view of its lines of  business across the enterprise—without sacrificing each business area’s uniqueness and individuality.
 

We can explore selected patterns in the dynamic business model to demonstrate how we can adapt it to support the business rules of any organization. So far, we have examined the business party pattern that represents the people and organizations of which your enterprise must be aware, independent of how they do business with you (see my February 16 column to refresh your memory). To complete the pattern, we must extend it to accommodate the interrelationships among business parties, such as a household’s members, an organization’s reporting structures and employees, or a legal entity’s owners.
 

 business party relationship has three components: the two business parties involved, the nature of the relationship, and the role each party assumes. The business rule statements that identify a relationship in which an enterprise is interested are normally stated from the perspective of one of the business parties involved. For example, the statement “Mary is the mother of Sam” identifies that we are interested in the family relationship between two people. “Mother” is the role assumed by one of the business parties. To understand fully the nature of the relationship between Mary and Sam, we must identify the role that Sam assumes. Is it sufficient to know that “Sam is the child of Mary,” or does your organization need to know whether Sam is a son or a daughter? When defining the business rules associated with business party relationships, you must examine the nature of the relationship from the perspective of both business parties.
 

 Business rules — as stated by the subject matter experts (SMEs) — frequently identify only one role of interest to the organization, implying the full
 nature of the relationship and business parties involved. This is particularly true when the organization you are analyzing is a participant in the relationship.
Therefore, we use the terms “customer,” “supplier,” “employee,” “regulator,”or “shareholder” alone with the implication that the organization is on the other
side of the relationship. Although the SMEs will state that “Mary is a customer” or “Sam is an employee,” the actual business statements are “Mary is a customer of my organization” and “Sam is an employee of my organization.”
 

When searching for business party relationships that are meaningful to your organization, look for business statements that follow one of these patterns:
 “<business party category> is a <noun>,” “<business party category> is the <noun> of <business party category>,” or “<business party category> <verb statement> <business party category>.” The business party category identifies what kind of business party can assume the role, while the noun states the role
that business parties of that category can assume in the relationship. In the third template, the verb statement defines the nature of the role.
 

For example, you can restate the business rules “individuals can be employees” or “employees are individuals” as “individuals can be employees of legal entities.” Now the business rule statement identifies a single business party category that has the ability to assume a specific role with respect to another business party category. We still need to uncover the nature of the relationship and the reciprocal role. To complete the business party relationship pattern for employees, you must probe for business rule statements from the other business party category’s perspective — in this case, the legal entity. In many situations, you can easily discover the inverse role by simply turning the business rule statement around. For example, “we employ individuals” or “legal entities are the employers of individuals.”
 

The relationship can be so weighted toward one role that your SMEs may never discuss the reciprocal role, however. In these cases, the other role usually emerges when you develop a good definition of the known role. For example, the definition of shareholder is “a business party that holds an equity position in a legal entity.” If the legal entity is a corporation, its stock represents the equity. Therefore, for a corporation, a shareholder is any business party that has purchased the corporation’s stock. In this situation, the nature of the business party relationship is ownership: one party owns and the other is owned. “Shareholder” is the special business term that connotes the owner’s role. However, no special business term exists for the role of the owned.  Role definitions are also useful in identifying different business terms referring to the same business concept. For example, a subsidiary is a legal entity that is fully owned by another legal entity. To “fully own” a corporation, the parent company must own 100 percent of the subsidiary’s available stock. The parent-subsidiary business party relationship is just a specialization of the ownership relationship: “Parent” identifies the legal entity in the owner (shareholder) role and “subsidiary” identifies the legal entity assuming the owned role. Table 1 presents some commonly used business terms that meet the business party relationship pattern.
 
 
 
 

                                       Table 1 Business party relationship examples
 

Although any organization can adopt the business party relationship pattern, the relationships are usually different from one organization to the next, dictated by the culture and values of each. In many cases, the relationships of interest can vary from one line of business to another within the same organization. One organization may be interested in all aspects of the family relationships among people, whereas another may need to know only that a household exists. The latter will maintain only enough information to identify which people are members of the same household, but the former is interested in the interrelationships among the family members: the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and even grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
 

As an alternative to establishing business party relationships for each family variation, you can generalize the nature of relationships into spousal and parental. Use other information about the business parties to derive the specific roles that each assumes in the family. For example, you can use a person’s gender to determine whether a spouse is the wife or the husband.Likewise, you can infer a sibling relationship when two entities have the same parent.
 

The only data we maintain about a business party relationship is the relationship’s beginning and ending dates, the date when the organizations recognized the relationship, and the date when the enterprise was no longer interested in the relationship. You can maintain additional information about the relationship through the agreement. For example, a lawyer would establish a prenuptial agreement to hold information about the client’s marriage terms. Likewise, details about an employee — salary, title, position, and date of last promotion — are held as part of an employment agreement. Agreement is one of the essential customer relationship building blocks that specifies the details about the products and services your organization is providing to your customers.

FIGURE 1 BUSINESS PARTY RELATIONSHIP DATA MODEL.
 
 
 

The data model for the business party relationship pattern (see Figure 1) contains the now familiar split between the category entities that are used to
 specify an organization’s business rules and the actual details about the relationships that exist among specific business parties. All the generalization hierarchies for the category entities are incomplete, indicating that they can be extended to meet the specific relationships required by your organization. The category subtypes will become rows in the supporting tables. Finally, the  “allowable business party relationship role” identifies a role that a specific business party category can assume with respect to a specific relationship category. When a relationship begins between two real-world business parties, the “allowable” table ensures that business parties assume only the roles appropriate for their category.
 

The category and allowable entities are just two components that make the dynamic business model so flexible. This highly generalized model becomes
 the model for your organization when you populate it with your unique business rules. As I’ve discussed, incorporating the category and allowable constructs into the business party and relationship patterns provides the flexibility to support a diverse set of relationships, including households, families, and organizational reporting structures. To fully appreciate how these patterns and constructs enable business change, you need to understand how to populate these entities with some business rules, which will be the topic of the next article in this series.
 

 RESOURCES
 Fowler, Martin. Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models. Addison-Wesley, 1996.
 

Gamma, Erich; Richard Helm; Ralph Johnson; and  John Vlissides. Design Patterns: Element of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Addison-Wesley, 1994.
 

Terry Moriarty, president of Inastrol, a San Francisco-based information management consultancy, specializes in customer relationship information and metadata management. She authored Enterprise View (originally the Repository Report and later the Data Architect) column for Database Programming & Design. You can reach her via email at terry@inastrol.com.