Guideline: Business Event
A business event defines the drivers of the business on a day-to-day basis; the things that result in business activity starting or modifying the business process. This guideline explains how to find and define business events.
Relationships
Related Elements
Main Description

Introduction

In Concept: IT Architecture the idea of viewpoints (views and aspects) that are used to describe the IT architecture of a "system". A business event is not one of the aspects, or vertical slices through the architecture—it does not appear as a specific column in the UAM framework, but is part of the "Activity" aspect. Events drive, and control, the activities within the business. Note: the term "business event" is used here in the generic sense—it applies to all levels of modeling: the Business, Logical and Technical Perspectives. See:Term Definition: Business Event.

Events

At the Business Perspective level, the notion of event is used to identify and describe the business level events that are important in understanding how the business operates and how these events relate to activities, tasks and processes. The Business Process Model viewpoint supports the capture of events by describing the business activities, and organizes them into a model. See: Guideline: Business Process Model. At the business level there are a limited number of types of event defined in UAM. The events defined at the business level are generic—this list included in the Business Perspective Language includes:

  • Start Event - an unspecified start event;
  • End Event - an unspecified end event;
  • Timer Start - a timer start event.

The Start and End events are generic, since at the Business level it is best to stay high-level and generic, and develop more detail and specifics in the Logical Perspective. See: Supporting Material: BPL Defined.

The Logical and Technical Perspective Languages have large numbers of events defined; see: Supporting Material: LPL Defined and Supporting Material: TPL Defined. 

Finding Events

A starting point for finding events (and the start for business processes) are the relationships between Actors and Activities (i.e. the "system"). A business event typically triggers the start of the business activity/process.

Also look at the activities and tasks within the system and the business process involved. Often business events are needed to pass control between processes or between tasks.

Similarly if business entities have states defined then the state transitions may define possible business events. Also, any significant operations of a business entity are candidate business events.

© David W. Enstrom, 2025. All rights reserved.