Terry Moriarty and Dwight Seeley
The daily routine of human thought involves a considerable amount of fuzzy logic. The terms used can be
very vague. The meaning of words is often derived from their context rather than from their dictionary
definition, of which there may be several. Consequently, the business models we initially create reflect
the meaning of the words as used by our subject matter experts (SME) within their specific, and often
narrowly focused, perspective of the business. In most organizations, only a few people have a
perspective that is truly enterprisewide; they are rarely in the room when we are conducting business
analysis sessions.
In an effort to precisely capture the business rules as the available SMEs state them, we express our
models in the vocabulary of the problem domain, reflecting its hidden context. (See Figure 1.) When
analyzing human resources, for example, we see name and address as employee attributes. Yet, when
analyzing how the business wants to perform customer relationship management (CRM), those same properties
are client attributes. And, when viewed from the enterprise perspective, it is easy to see that lurking
behind the employee and client objects are people and organizations.
However, while you’re steeped in the domain of the specific business problem being analyzed, these
fundamental object classes may not be exposed; their existence is so patently obvious to all the
stakeholders. We are more interested in how people and organizations behave within specific business
roles than we are in those entities in isolation. What is deemed inessential when only a slice of the
organization is under the microscope can be significant from an enterprise perspective. One of an
enterprise model’s primary functions is to provide a framework through which you can integrate all
the individual domain-specific models. Context-specific language, which loses much of its descriptive
power outside its context, must be translated into a global vocabulary to facilitate identifying and
documenting concepts common to all aspects of the business. The need for a global vocabulary is why many
organizations are turning to dynamic business models as the basis of their enterprise models, because
they reflect the information structures required just to exist in the business world. By exposing the
obvious, dynamic business models can provide a bridge between business’ universal language and the
collection of dialects unique to the various lines of business within a single enterprise. The last
series of Metaprise columns about the dynamic business model made the case that people and organizations
of interest to the enterprise must be analyzed as though independent of the roles they assume. The
“business party” and “business party relationship” subject areas resulted; they
address what an organization needs to know about people, organ- izations, the names they use, and their
interrelationships. The resultant model (see Figure 2) illustrates how information originally depicted
about both employees and clients — such as their names, addresses, and phone numbers — are
really attributes of the business party. By giving this information a common reference across all roles,
the processes required to maintain and use it need to be accommodated only once; you don’t have to
reinvent the wheel for each role.
Address: Not That Simple
However, in its treatment of addresses and phone numbers, this model still doesn’t recognize some
context hiding in plain sight. There is an entire set of information structures that are buried behind
those simple attributes of address and phone number. It is time we focus on the information we need to
find things and to direct communications to business parties.
The word address is a wonderful example of how fuzzy logic is used every day in business. A whole
collection exists of terms that provide the context underlying the simple word address. (See sidebar,
“Address-Oriented Terms Defined,”) When used in the act or process of locating, address is seen
as a coding structure associated with some thing in the same way in which name is associated with some
thing. Both exist to designate and distinguish one business object from the others. There are many ways
to designate and distinguish a business object; when we are locating something, we designate and
distinguish business objects by address. When one business party wishes the U.S. Postal Service (USPS)
to deliver correspondence to another business party, the sending party must adhere to a standard method
of locating the receiving party. This standard requires the sending party to provide the USPS with at
least one (and in some instances only one type of) designator for each of several other constructs. For
example, the USPS asks for the name of a city (City Name), state (State Name), and country (the country
named U.S.A. is implied in the absence of a Country Name). Postal zones are identified by a coding
structure called ZIP Codes. The USPS uses these codes to identify a specific postal substation. Site
identifiers that further distinguish location include Street Number and Name, Room, Suite, Apartment,
Building, P. O. Box, and Rural Route. Taken in some grouping, these designators act as the “written
directions on mail indicating destination.” Remember that the USPS is not nearly as concerned with
who or what as with where. We purposely omitted the designator Person Name (and/or Corporate Name) to
show that without this designator the USPS can still locate a destination and deliver an envelope to it.
Without the Person Name or Corporate Name designator, the implied recipient is “any entity that has
any association with the most discrete unit of location the sender indicated.” Any grouping of some
or all of these designators, used for this locating purpose, has come to be known as a Mailing
Address.
We are suggesting that Mailing Address is not an entity in and of itself, because any combination of
other entities’ designators will allow locating, to some extent. It may not enable pinpoint-accurate
locating, as exemplified by the following two valid USPS addresses:
Mr. John Smith P.O. Box 4009 Atlanta, GA
30302-4009 Mr. John Smith Georgia State University University
Plaza Atlanta, GA 30303
The USPS will deliver mail with either of these addresses to exactly the same site: Georgia State
University’s postal room. GSU employees will then have to decide which of the 37 John Smiths at the
university for whom the correspondence is intended.
Forms of Address
Mailing is one application that demands the address concept. With today’s technologies, the word
“address” requires even more modifiers that denote application. As detailed by the dictionary,
computer science uses address as “a number that designates a specific memory location.”
A phone number is another instance of address application, but the address of what? A person may have a
mobile phone programmed with an address that appears as a phone number (999-999-9999). This “phone
number” is associated with a device associated with the person but is not the address of that
person, nor does it indicate the geographic position of the mobile phone device. It is instead a
destination address for telecommunication. Just as the mailing address never guarantees the locating of
the most discrete unit of location, the phone number works like an address indicating destination but
never guaranteeing location. Under what circumstances do we consider Phone Address to be a business
object in its own right? Electronic mail has created yet another addressing application. Standards
exist for structuring email addresses, with the most common being <anytext>@ <domain>. Again,
we must locate in order to facilitate communication. But this address does not “locate” the
associated person; it allows you to put the mail in a place where the person can locate it. The message
(mail) is delivered to that place by an “electronic postal service.” Once again, an address
application demands to know destination. Addressing must be used to determine the location of the
destination, while never guaranteeing the location of the most discrete unit that is the recipient of
that communication.
Location can be accomplished through another form of Address generally referred to as geographic
coordinates (latitude, longitude, and elevation). In this case, the physical environment is described by
a system of fixed reference points. Each point addresses “a place where a structure or group of
structures was, is, or will be located” (see Site). It is the Site that is located, while the thing
that we are trying to find only exists in some proximity to that site. A person, designated by Person
Name, will always hold a frame of proximity to any set of these points. A person could be located with
this address.
What do these scenarios tell us about Address? For one, it is not inherently a part of a person or
organization. The person designated by Name does not literally have an address. Two, with every
address we attempt to identify a destination, or site, to which the intended recipient could have access
or be proximate, without guaranteeing the location of the recipient. In so doing, Site is established as
the thing that is addressed. By using some coding structure through which to define the domain, Address
will locate Site and, so located, the site may place the sending business party’s message in
proximity to the intended receiving party. Person Name and/or Corporate Name may have an association with
many Addresses through their association with many Sites.
Once we understand the true nature of the address as a vehicle for enabling communication between
business parties or in locating a specific geographic point, new models will emerge. Figure 3, presents
such a new model; it depicts the importance of these locators as business concepts in their own right.
There’s no longer an excuse to relegate them to mere attributes of people or organizations.
Terry Moriarty, president of Inastrol, a San Francisco-based information management
consultancy, specializes in customer relationship information and metadata management. You can reach her
via email at terry@inastrol.com.
Dwight Seeley is president and consulting principal for Corporate Information Designs
Inc., an Arizona-based information and object architecture firm. You can reach him at dseeley@CorpInfoDesigns.com or via www.CorpInfoDesigns.com
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October 05, 1999, Volume 2 - Number 14
