B.I.O.Frame

B.I.O.Frame™ is a generic framework for managing an organization's business information and operations. It is a tool we use to structure our analysis of an organization's business functions to ensure consistent and comprehensive coverage.

Any organization is concerned with managing three functional areas: general management, value delivery and resource management.

• General Management is concerned with setting the organization's direction and plans, monitoring progress, and establishing the rules and organizational structures to be used.
• Value Delivery is concerned with achieving the organization's mission by delivering value to the organization's constituency. It does this by providing products and/or services, managing relationships with customers and suppliers and (for government organizations) maintaining a legislative framework for the public good.
• Resource Management is concerned with managing the organization's various resources (People, Money, Physical Assets and Information) in a manner that supports the organization's plans and value delivery activities.

The principal business objects in each area have a life history or life cycle that must be managed. The organization's business functions are based on the management of these things and are categorized into four life history groups that appear to be common for all principal business objects. These life cycle stages are called Preparation, Acquisition, Stewardship and Disposition. This four-stage structure is based on the life cycle stages for managing resources and has been successfully applied to the management of objects in the other areas.

Although this functional structure looks like an organization chart, it is not. Any organization unit in the enterprise could perform any legitimate sub-set of the functions anywhere in this structure. For example, a manager of Accounting must still manage plans for his/her own area (an "Enterprise Management" function), manage their staff (a "Resource Management" function) and define the services to be provided to internal clients (a "Value Delivery" function). This structure does not require that an enterprise be organized in the same way. Rather, it is a tool to structure our analysis of an organization's business functions to ensure that it is consistent and comprehensive.

Benefits

B.I.O.Frame™ is a tool that provides several benefits:

• It is independent of organization structure. Therefore, it can be used as a sound basis for planning and analysis regardless of the organizational turmoil (repeated reorganization exercises) common in most industries.
• It provides consistent and comprehensive coverage of business operations and information support requirements. This means that information strategy planning and information architecture exercises can get rolling quickly and be completed much sooner than starting from scratch.
• The comprehensive coverage provides improved quality in the resulting plans and strategies.
• It provides a sound basis for both object-oriented and information engineering systems planning initiatives.

Please feel free to browse the demonstration Hypermodel produced by B.I.O.Frame/RS™.