Digital Identity

Business Function Matrix

A business function matrix (BFM) is a matrix that documents the business functions that your organization performs and which organizations within the enterprise perform them. The steps to creating a BFM are fairly straightforward:

1. Document the structure of your enterprise.

2. Define the business functions your enterprise performs.

3. Map the business functions to the major organizations within the enterprise.

Creating the BFM might not take very long in a simple business like iMall. In a complex organization, the process might take considerably longer. The U.S. federal government has a BFM called the Business Reference Model that was assembled over the course of several years.

Organizations' units are arrayed along one axis of the BFM. The chief decision is how fine-grained you want to be. It's entirely reasonable to start the process with a high-level, abstract view of the organization and then drill down into more specific information as the IMA process evolves.

The goal of building a business model is to determine what functions various parts of the company are performing. If this were a business book, we'd be concerned with finding out if those activities led to competitive advantage, but that question is clearly beyond our scope. We're merely trying to find out what happens, not decide whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing. Your organization may have already performed a competitive advantage exercise, and in that case, the information about who's doing ...