Patent ID: 8340995

Claim:
A method for identifying elements of a component business model, comprising: identifying the business artifacts operated on by a business, wherein a business artifact is a concrete identifiable chunk of business information comprising forms, documents and/or messages, and is a concrete and identifiable container of business information wherein the container makes sense to a businessperson; using the business artifacts from the identifying step, processing the business into business services, wherein a business service is represented by an annotated sub-graph, annotated with a verb expression, and is some well-defined function that a business component offers to other business components and/or to external parties; clustering the business services into asset based non-overlapping components; clustering the components into non-overlapping competencies, wherein using the business artifacts to analyze the business further comprises, for each identified business artifact: identifying every business activity that acts on the business artifact during a lifecycle of the business artifact; creating a directed graph for the identified business activities; identifying one or more cleave points for decomposing the directed graph into sub graphs, each sub graph representing a sequence of activities at a level of granularity suitable for the business, each said cleave point being located at a place that minimizes transfer of data and messages between business processes while maximizing the locality of information within the business process; decomposing the directed graph into sub-graphs at each of said one or more cleave points; annotating each sub graph with a verb expression, each sub graph representing a business operation and each annotated sub graph representing a business service; and wherein the above-recited method steps are performed by a computer.