ITech startup of the month.

• Author: PETERSON, ERIC
• Position: Information technology company BusinessGenetics - Brief Article

INTIAL LIGHTBULE: A 20-year IT veteran/entrepreneur, BusinessGenetics Managing Partner Cedric Tyler came to Denver in 1993 as a consultant for J.D. Edwards, then wavered between semi-retirement and another startup. The latter eventually won out, for which Tyler drew on a phenomenon that relentlessly recurred throughout his career. "Everybody talks about the 'digital divide,'" he explained. "My spin on that is, in every enterprise or business, you have a divide as well. It's between business folks and technologists. You've got techno-centric folks that are very familiar with bits and bytes ... but they don't understand the business and, of course, the business folks don't understand their world."

In response to this "enterprise divide," Tyler teamed with systems integration expert and fellow Denver University adjunct professor Steve Baker and founded BusinessGenetics. They collaborated on a language for modeling business processes -- designed for management types and IT gurus alike -- in xBML, extended business modeling language.

IN A NUTSHELL: The 30-employee BusinessGenetics asks its clients a series of simple questions (i.e. "Why are you in business?" and "Which information is needed to perform a given activity?") and models their enterprise with xBML. "This evolves into a relatively simple set of diagrams that answers all of those fundamental questions," said Tyler. "It's a language for business folks to express how they want to run their business." As no one person grasps every last intricacy of a large organization, BusinessGenetics engages in a process called "co-formulation," by which the same questions are asked of multiple employees in order to validate the model.

The purpose of these models varies, depending on the customer -- BusinessGenetics helped Qwest streamline its inbound sales processes and J.D. Edwards restructure customer care -- and Tyler touted xBML as an "industry-neutral" tool. To wit, another BusinessGenetics client, the National Forest Service, has "thousands of pages of legal terminology that they have to comply with," said Tyler. In this case, xBML served as "a bridge not only between business technology, but a bridge between the regulations and the implementation of these regulations."

Ultimately, BusinessGenetics' modeling helped the Forest Service in its decision to revise unwieldy planning regulations. "They helped people see very clearly the magnitude of the task," said the agency's Thomas Hoekstra. "It...