Many of the critical characteristics of an architecture are only discovered when an architecture's dynamic behaviors are defined and described. The dynamic behavior referred to here concerns the timing and sequencing of events that capture operational behavior of a business process.

Three types of models are needed to refine and extend the architecture's operational view to adequately describe the dynamic behavior and performance characteristics of an architecture:

The Operational State Transition Description and the Operational Event/Trace Description may be used separately or together, as necessary, to describe critical timing and sequencing behavior in the operational view. Both types of diagrams are used by a wide variety of different Business Process methodologies. The Operational State Transition Description and the Operational Event/Trace Description describe business-process responses to sequences of events. Events may also be referred to as inputs, transactions or triggers. When an event occurs, the action to be taken may be subject to a rule or set of rules as described in the Operational Rules Model.