Identifying the Authority for any business decision establishes responsibility and supports authorization.
Identifying Authorities establishes Stakeholders. For a set of assertions the only stakeholders are the authorities who receive or create information. Authorities are established at the operational levels, and and operational decisions. And they are established at the management level and make management decisions. Representatives of the organization are given the authority to make decisions on behalf of the organization.
Decisions are made in Assertions. They create new information.
When decisions are communicated, a business event occurs. The decisions are based on other information that is created in the organization. The authority uses input information, formal and informal and their experience to make the decision. Decisions will be supported from information delivered from other authorities within and outside the organization. The weighing of the incoming information will be guided by the veracity of the authorities who supply it.
The decision for some assertions may be automatically calculated based on the inputs. The authority remains responsible for those the calculation is performed. These automatically evaluated assertions are typically implemented within digital systems.
Frames define and structure the information created in the Assertion.
Information is passed between Frames by Connections.
The Connections identify how information flows in the organization. When a connection is identified between two assertions, when information is created in the source assertion it is available in the target assertion. The information passed is in the format of the source assertion.
— Assertions and Connections create a network of decisions and information flows. —-
Subsets of the network are identified as Perspectives that contain assertions that are of concern.
While the network of assertions captures the coherence of the business, Perspectives provide a way to focus on a part of the business of particular concern. A perspective can show how information flows between its constituents but can also show information flows into and out of the perspective. Perspectives support business design where a proposed assertion model can be built and adjusted by editing assertions and connections while viewing the impact of changes on the Perspectives.
Assertions are implemented into Environments. Information is protected and easy to exchange within an Environment.
Environments recognize that people who hold responsibility for an authority capture their decisions at a place where communications can occur. Since communication can be visual, aural, tactile, mechanical and digital the access of an authority to an environment is part of the challenge of designing business and its systems. An individual software application can be considered as an environment. People can be given access to an environment and assertions that are implemented in that environment can easily exchange that information, even to authorities in other organizations who have access.
When information must cross environments the implementation of connections becomes more complex and costly. So environments are important ingredients of business design
Implementations are sets of assertions to be implemented, and the Environment that supports them.