Business Modeling: Workflow

There are several paths one may take through this workflow, depending on what purpose your business-modeling effort has, as well as where in the development lifecycle you are.

• In your first iteration you will assess the status of the organization in which the eventual system is to be deployed (the target organization), as defined in Assess Business Status. Based on the results of the assessments, you will be able to make decisions on how to continue in this iteration, and also on how to work in subsequent iterations. In Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling you will find some typical scenarios that may occur. 
• If you determine that no full scale business models are needed, only a domain model (scenario #2 in Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling), you will follow the alternative Domain Modeling path of this workflow. In the Rational Unified Process, a domain model is considered a subset of the business object model, encompassing the business entities of that model.
• If you determine that no major changes will occur to the business processes, all you need to do is chart those processes and derive system requirements (scenario #1 in Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling). There is no need to keep a special set of models of the current organization, you can directly focus on describing the target organization. You would follow the business modeling path, but skip "describe current business".
• If you do business modeling with the intention of improving or re-engineering an existing business (scenario #3, #4, and #6 in Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling), you would model both the current business and the new business.
• If you do business modeling with the intention of developing a new business more or less from scratch (scenario #5 in Concepts: Scope of Business Modeling), you would envision the new business and build models of the new business, but skip "describe current business".

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Rational Unified Process