Business Modeling and translating the model into analysis and design models have been a practice in the industry for while. Identifying the basic business entities as part of business analysis provides a way to create a candidate model structure for the software the solution and even for the persistence or database schema.

Many a time, analysis and design modeling process help architects identify the candidate architectural patterns or design patterns suitable for the solution. From a practical perspective, keeping the business domain model, analysis model and design models separate and in sync with the code (implementation model) become extremely challenging over the time.

One approach could be, using the analysis model as a transient model while translating business domain model into a design model so that the required architectural patterns and the structure of the solution are identified during the process and then dropping the analysis model altogether. That'll leave us with business domain model and design model.

If we can combine business domain model and design model into a single model which provides views of both from business perspective and design perspective,  it'll be great and easier for us to maintain a single business domain cum design model. Now the process involved in identifying the business entities and expanding them into entities of design behavior while retaining the business context intact within the model could be a challenge.

A recently published article in MSDN, which provides an introduction to domain driven design, seems to be interesting. It talks about context maps,  entities around business problem context and patterns (layered architecture, anti-corruption layers and so on)  to be used for designing solutions. 

Probably,  we can also look at other best practices around architecting & designing such as an MVC approach and multiples views while emphasizing the modeling aspect to keep the business domain model and the code in sync. Now, Identifying the entities through a business analysis process can be challenging as well. One of the approaches could be the one stated in Object Models by Peter Coad which provides a few sample case studies in this regard.