Architected Business Language (ABL): What It Is and How It Works

The Architected Business Language A B L TM was developed to address the eight key elements to successful business understanding and communication. These eight elements provide the underpinning of the three “sets” of communications that exist in an enterprise or organization – (1) Business people communicating with business people, (2) Technology people communicating with technology people, and finally (3) Business people communicating with technology people, and technology people communicating with business people. The overarching objective of A B L is to provide a communication mechanism that allows business expression of a problem or opportunity, that could potentially be transformed by technologists into mechanized or manual solutions. In understanding these objectives, the underlying design philosophy is to “keep it simple” – avoid unnecessary complexity.

The eight essential elements of successful business communication are:

The Five Minute Rule
A Structure
The 7±2 Rule
Clarity in Expression
Consistency in Expression
A Medium that is easily graspable
Expressive Relevancy - Concise
Timeliness

(1) The Five Minute Rule

In the internet-driven, multitasking, interrupt-driven world we live in, we have learned that imposing extensive new requirements of any kind on our business partners, subject matter experts, and customers just does not work – and frankly, correctly so. Teaching our business partners a modeling language or symbology with dozens of constraints, elements, arrows, “crow’s feet”, and accompanied by a 400-page manual will not cut it!

(2) Structure

How the interactions between business personnel and technologists are structured will determine the clarity of the understanding that results. Structure comes from the three essential design elements discussed previously – naming convention, graphical notation, and template-assisted definition, and the ability of humans to absorb and understand anything of complexity – the 7±2 Rule – discussed next.

(3) The 7±2 (seven plus or minus two) Rule

We as humans have a finite capacity to hold information in our short-term memory – we are not computers! Our brains retain information in “clusters” or “groups”. Numerous studies have determined that these clusters or groups are best understood if they are “limited” to seven plus or minus two items within a group or cluster.

(4) Clarity

Clarity is simply being on point. A B L has no elements that are not fully traceable from the business descriptors to potential end solutions. Providing a confused message to your business or technology personnel only confuses them and your message will be ignored, or worse, misinterpreted.

(5) Consistency

A B L defines a consistent vocabulary that is clear and unambiguous by defining each term used, providing extensive examples, templates, and with The Enterprise Framework, a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive set of artifacts that are each human consumable.

(6) Medium

The message and the medium are both important. Specialized “tooling” and/or software actually get in the way of business personnel understanding the message. Frankly, why should business people learn a special tool to understand themselves?! The sequence of events should not be “find a tool or software, and then fit the problem to the tool”, but to start with a frame of reference that this complete, and deliver an architected understanding in a medium that takes less than five minutes to understand. Too often, technologists confuse their need for or use of a tool or software, with presenting understanding to business personnel.

(7) Relevancy

Without a frame of reference – a Framework that is complete and clean – the inventive juices of technologists will continue to look for or “invent” the one representation that will solve all needs. Realization is occurring that there are six fundamental and exhaustive set of understandings that describe simple or complex opportunities or issues. Years of history have proven this to be the case.