The term business architecture is used in many contexts and there are many definitions within a wide range of frameworks. The purpose of this article is to focus very much on the business aspects of the architecture and the support that it provides for strategy execution, business change and the evaluation of the impact of each of these.
Let’s have a look at some of the key truths behind the concept. Business architecture as we see it, is in effect an underlying wiring of the business and it provides a business wide blueprint which helps in the identification and evaluation of new ideas and potential projects. It is also important to understand that it doesn’t cover the technical architectures but does need to link to them.
The scope of business architectures in fact the scope of the business itself. If we have a robust business architecture there are four main beneficiaries of this.
1. First there are senior executives of the business and by assisting them in the evaluation of new initiatives and enabling the execution of strategy the development of the business architecture allows executives to make more informed decisions.
2. The IT department will be able to implement changes that are consistent across the organization, identify high-level business requirements and promote governance and best practice at the project level.
3. Not only can the business process architecture help by identifying potential projects for improvement but also can facilitate consistent and coordinated delivery across all projects. Business architecture covers the scope of delivery of value to customers across organizational boundaries, it therefore considers the relationship with partners suppliers and customers and hence can provide a shared model for collaboration.
It enables senior management to make better informed decisions and help us to solve more complex Enterprise wide business problems. As a link into more detailed business analysis business architecture will enable us to derive high-level business needs which may be used as input to business and IT
solutions subsequently and finally it ensures the success of an overall architecture by serving as the driving force for supporting IT architectures rather than the other way around.
