Business Collaboration Modeling

Definition

Business Collaboration Modeling (BCM) is a discipline that explicitly models how people, groups, machines, and external entities work together to accomplish enterprise objectives. It expands the scope of traditional business process modeling to encompass all forms of collaboration—prescribed, adaptive, and ad hoc—recognizing that the actual organization includes formal hierarchies, informal working relationships, project teams, committees, and cross-boundary partnerships that never appear on an org chart.

In the Book

Cummins observes that "the full operating structure of the business is not visible from the typical organization chart." A traditional organization assigns roles through the management hierarchy, but substantial work happens through ad hoc project teams and task forces. More critically, the rise of knowledge workers—whose activities are "relatively self-directed and rely on their knowledge and experience"—has made these informal collaborations essential to operation. Fulfilling a customer order involves not just one process but a network of collaborations: applications receiving and validating orders, people resolving errors and authorizing credit, and delegations to collaborations managing production, packaging, and billing.

BCM models these collaborations consistently across production work, management hierarchies, project teams, committees, business partnerships, and professional groups. The book notes that CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) provides automation support for adaptive processes "defined and adjusted by the participating knowledge workers as the situation evolves," which BCM represents. The operational design of these collaborations may be prescribed, adaptive, or ad hoc, but all are essential to represent for understanding how the business actually works.

Why It Matters

BCM makes visible the informal networks and cross-organizational relationships that drive modern enterprise value creation. This visibility is necessary for agile enterprises because automation and change management tools cannot work with what remains hidden. By modeling collaborations explicitly, enterprises can identify bottlenecks in knowledge transfer, spot redundant coordination, and deliberately redesign how teams interact—not just optimize task sequences. It also honors the reality that knowledge work cannot be fully prescribed; the model becomes a tool for enabling adaptation rather than enforcing rigidity.