The BIAN standard and different model views of enterprises and business activity that use Service Domains provides a fairly unique perspective of business behavior. This perspective can be used to support a wide range of business planning and analysis as described in more detail in the How To Guide - Applying the Standard. In addition to supporting business planning through providing a powerful ‘bank on a page’ framework the BIAN model’s main benefit is that it provides design insights that support the progressive migration towards a service based architecture that enables business operational capability re-use. The key drivers and benefits for an enterprise to move in this direction are also described in more detail in the How To Guide but briefly they include:
- The ability to share (specialised) operational capabilities and so avoid duplication and fragmentation of business activity (and the supporting systems) reducing operational costs and increasing the leverage of scarce and specialist resources.
- The ability to build a more flexible and adaptive organization supported by similarly flexible systems that enable the enterprise more readily to exploit market opportunities and adopt different business models. This improves competitive capabilities reducing the costs associated with change and shortening the ‘time to money.’
- Allowing the enterprise to leverage advanced technologies and techniques with well partitioned systems that can be focused/targeted at addressing discrete business needs improving the return on systems investment and technology enabled differentiating business capabilities.
A secondary impact of adopting the BIAN model is that it can be used to support the implementation of standard systems solutions, including assisting with the adoption of standard services through technologies such as an enterprise service bus (ESB). It can also help enable software and re-use for shared and utility solutions