Some things can’t be said too often: The key skill in todays business is the provision of concise »on the point« information. Of course this doesn’t only work with coffee.

The following scribble shows an example how to display business processes along with their underlying technical counterparts (services and databases).

The diagram was used in one of my last engagements and provided a lot of information in one view:

• The business process
• The (external) services called
• Necessary middleware/adapters
• Underlying datasources

The boxes pointing to the right symbolize »callbacks« i. e. calls in an asynchronous scenario with arbitrary time between the calls. The boxes with an open left side stand for the counterpart waiting for such calls. If services couldn’t be called directly e. g. because protocol conversion had to be considered (RMI2SOAP, …) the adapter swimlane was used to show the middleware in use.

Of course the boxes were labeled with even more information but for now the general blueprint is interesting enough. Techies and Business Folks were discussing the same diagrams. Questions of data origin and synchronisatin problem could be simultaneously discussed in terms of processes and technical constraints.

Of course there are countless variations of this swimlane-like type of diagram. Any ideas? What are possible improvements? What do you use in similar contexts?