Table of Contents
What is Business Architecture and how do you Define Business Architecture?
The Business Architecture Guild
and several related professional bodies and industry standards provides a definition of business architecture as:
“Business architecture represents holistic, multidimensional business views of capabilities, end-to-end value delivery, information, and organisational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders.”
The Object Management Group (OMG) provides the definition of Business Architecture as:
“The structure of the enterprise in terms of its governance structure, business processes, and business information. In defining the structure of the enterprise, business architecture considers customers, finances, and the ever-changing market to align strategic goals and objectives with decisions regarding products and services; partners and suppliers; organisation; capabilities; and key initiatives.”
Business architecture provides a useful blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organisation and is used to align strategic objectives, tactical demands and improve performance.
Business architecture blueprints provides a common understanding and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands and provides a variety of ways to view the business:
- Sharing perspective.
- Common terminology.
- Viewing stakeholders.
- Value delivery.
What are the Elements of Business Architecture?
What are the elements of business architecture? There are main core elements of business architecture include:
- Information – the vocabulary it uses to communicate. Asks the question “What”?
- Capability – what a business does. Ask the questions “What”?
- Organisation – the structure of the business. Asks the questions “Who and Where”?
- Value Stream – how it delivers value to stakeholders. Asks the question “How”?
The main core areas can be expanded into elements of a business architecture eco-system (informing business scenarios and blueprints):
- Stakeholders
. - Policies.
- Capabilities.
- Strategies.
- Organisation.
- Information.
- Value Streams.
- Products.
- Metrics.
- Initiatives.
Business architecture elements enable organisations to see the big picture of the domain that is under analysis. The business architecture elements provide insights into the important aspect of the organisation and how they fit together and highlight the critical components or capabilities.
Why is Business Architecture Needed?
Why is business architecture needed? When change is being considered, the business architecture provides details on the elements that are most relevant for the purposes of the change, allowing for prioritisation and resource allocation. Because a business architectural also shows how the parts are related, it can be used to provide impact analysis to tell what other elements of the business might be affected by the change.
The business architecture itself can be used as a tool to help identify needed changes. The performance metrics for each element of the architecture can be monitored and assessed to identify when an element is under-performing. The importance of each element can be compared with the performance of the organisation. This assists decision makers when considering where investment is needed and how to prioritise those decisions.
The function of business architecture is to facilitate coordinated and synchronised action across the organisation by aligning action with the organisation’s vision, goals, and strategy. The architectural models created in this process are the tools used to clarify, unify, and provide understanding of the intent of the vision, goals, and strategy, and to ensure that resources are focused and applied to the elements of the organisation that align with and support this direction.
Business architecture also helps to align the organisation with its business units; details how an organisation is structured and demonstrate how elements (such as information, capabilities) of the business fit together.
Business architecture is typically used alongside other business and operating models (which is focussed on process, people, and technology) to enable businesses to drive investments based on a shared view of the business. A well-defined business architecture allows an organisation to align its operating model to a holistic business strategy.
In organisations, the role who develops the business architecture is typically given the title as a business architect. A business architect working as a change agent with senior stakeholders, the business architect has an important role to play in shaping business initiatives including, transformation and improvements.
Building and implementing a business architecture is very demanding. It requires exemplary corporate leadership, collaboration between all enterprise organisations, and visionary designers. It is not a project type initiative with an estimated start/stop date and fixed budget, but a new corporate behaviour and way of life.
It is important to elevate business architecture from more than boxes and arrows and embed the discipline as an integral part of an enterprise business and technology transformation to enable business architecture to succeed.
What is the Value of Business Architecture?
What is the value of business architecture? The Business Architecture Guild describes t he value of business architecture is to provide an abstract representation of a business enterprise and the business ecosystem in which it operates.
By doing so, business architecture delivers value as an effective communication and analytical framework for translating strategy into actionable initiatives. The framework also enhances the business enterprises capacity to enact transformational change, navigate complexity, reduce risk, make more informed decision, align diverse stakeholders to a shared business vision of the future, and leverage technology more effectively.
The value business architecture provides:
- An agreed view of the business.
- A depiction of where the value of the organisation is generated.
- Understanding how the goals and strategy of the organisation are translated into work that gets done.
- A means to identify the impact of change.
- A view where information technology does and does not support the business.
What are the Principles of Business Architecture?
What are the principles of business architecture? Business architecture follows certain fundamental business architectural principles:
- The scope of business architecture is the entire enterprise. It is not a single project, initiative, process, or piece of information.
- Business architecture separates concerns within its context. It specifically separates what the business does from:
- The information the business uses.
- How the business is performed.
- Who does it and where in the enterprise it is done.
- When it is done.
- Why it is done, an.
- How well it is done.
What is the Business Architecture Guild?
Business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. It arose from IT professionals seeking to understand business requirements and business people, and consultancies working on business improvement, processes, quality and strategy execution.
By the early 2000s the discipline began to be recognised as a specialist role and organisations started to appoint business architects to help design and document the way their businesses operated.
In 2010 the Business Architecture Guild was formed in the US and it assembled a body of knowledge – BIZBOK – which is updated regularly and provides a valuable resource for practitioners.
What is the business architecture guild? The Business Architecture Guild body of knowledge provides guidance to business architects for the creation and application of business architecture across various scenarios as well as the deployment and governance of the practices.
The body of knowledge also provides insights into how to use business architecture to achieve business goals through an overall framework that integrates with business process, case management, business analysis, and information technology disciplines. The body of knowledge also provides a useful framework for organising the business architecture.
What is the best business architecture certification? The Business Architecture Guild is the best business architecture certification for business architects and aspiring business architects.
What is the Object Management Group (OMG)?
The Object Management Group (OMG) is a body dedicated to developing standards for the modelling of businesses. The OMG emerged to fill gaps in design methods not fully addressed previously in enterprise architecture.
The OMG has developed standards such as Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN).
What is the Open Group?
The Open Group is a consortium of companies and individuals developing standards to help the information technology community. The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is widely used by enterprise architects to guide their design of the information and systems architecture of the organisation. TOGAF has a phase for business architecture.
Another framework commonly used by enterprise architects is Zachman. This framework has six interrogative categories (columns): What, How, Where, Who, When, Why and six perspectives (rows): Executive, Business Management, Architect, Engineer, Technician, and Functioning Enterprise. The perspectives represent increased levels of detail and physicality to assist different stakeholders in “seeing” the business.