The Business Architecture Perspective highlights the unique characteristics of business analysis when practiced in the context of business architecture.
Business architecture models the enterprise in order to show how strategic concerns of key stakeholders are met and to support ongoing business transformation efforts.
Business architecture provides architectural descriptions and views, referred to as blueprints, to provide a common understanding of the organization for the purpose of aligning strategic objectives with tactical demands. The discipline of business architecture applies analytical thinking and architectural principles to the enterprise level. The solutions may include changes in the business model, operating model, organizational structure, or drive other initiatives.
Business architecture follows certain fundamental architectural principles:
- Scope: the scope of business architecture is the entire enterprise. It is not a single project, initiative, process, or piece of information. It puts projects, processes, and information into the larger business context to provide an understanding of interactions, integration opportunities, redundancies, and inconsistencies.
- Separation of concerns: 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, and
- how well it is done.
Once the independent concerns are identified, they can be grouped in specific combinations or mappings, which can be used to analyze targeted business issues.
- Scenario driven: there are many different questions that a business tries to answer to provide the blueprint for alignment. Each of these different questions or business scenarios requires a different set of blueprints containing a different set of information and relationships, with different types of outcomes and measures to determine success.
- Knowledge based: while the primary goal of business architecture is to answer these business questions, a secondary but important goal is to collect and catalogue the different architectural components (what, how, who, why, etc.) and their relationships in a knowledge base so they can quickly and easily be used to help answer the next business question that comes up. The knowledge base is often managed in a formal architectural repository.
11.4.1 Change Scope
.1 Breadth of Change
Business architecture may be performed:
- across the enterprise as a whole,
- across a single line of business within the enterprise (defining the architecture of one of the enterprise’s business models), or
- across a single functional division.
Business architecture activities are generally performed with a view of the entire enterprise in mind, but may also be performed for an autonomous business unit within the enterprise. A broad scope is required to manage consistency and integration at the enterprise level. For example, business architecture can clarify a situation where the same business capability is implemented by multiple different processes and multiple different organizations using different information models. Given the clarity that comes from an enterprise scope, the business can then determine if this structure is the best way to align with strategic objectives.
.2 Depth of Change
A business architecture effort may focus on the executive level of the enterprise to support strategic decision making, or on the management level to support the execution of initiatives.
While business architecture provides important context, it does not usually operate at the operational decision or process level; instead, it assesses processes at the level of the value stream.
.3 Value and Solutions Delivered
Business architecture, using the principle of separation of concerns, develops models that decompose the business system, solution, or organization into individual elements with specific functions and shows the interactions between them.
The elements of business architecture models include:
- capabilities,
- value,
- processes,
- information and data,
- organization,
- reporting and management,
- stakeholders,
- security strategies, and
- outcomes.
Architecture models enable organizations to see the big picture of the domain that is under analysis. They provide insights into the important elements of the organization or software system and how they fit together, and highlight the critical components or capabilities.
The insights provided by business architecture help keep systems and operations functioning in a coherent and useful manner, and add clarity to business decisions. When change is being considered, the architecture provides details on the elements that are most relevant for the purposes of the change, allowing for prioritization and resource allocation. Because an architectural model also shows how the parts are related, it can be used to provide impact analysis to tell what other elements of the system or the business might be affected by the change.
The 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 organization or system as a whole. This assists decision makers when considering where investment is needed and how to prioritize those decisions.
The function of business architecture is to facilitate coordinated and synchronized action across the organization by aligning action with the organization’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 organization that align with and support this direction.
Business architecture provides a blueprint that management can use to plan and execute strategies from both information technology (IT) and non-IT perspectives.
Business architecture is used by organizations to guide:
- strategic planning,
- business remodeling,
- organization redesign,
- performance measurement and other transformation initiatives to improve customer retention,
- streamlining business operations,
- cost reduction,
- the formalization of institutional knowledge, and
- the creation of a vehicle for businesses to communicate and deploy their business vision.
.4 Delivery Approach
Business architecture creates a planning framework that provides clarity and insight into the organization and assists decision makers in identifying required changes. The architectural blueprints provided by business architecture provide an insight and understanding of how well the organization aligns to its strategy. This insight is the trigger for change or other planning activities.
For each blueprint provided, business architecture may define:
- current state,
- future state, and
- one or more transition states that are used to transition to the future state.
Business architects require a view of the entire organization. In general, they may report directly to a member of senior leadership. Business architects require a broad understanding of the organization, including its:
- environment and industry trends,
- structure and reporting relationships,
- value streams,
- capabilities,
- processes,
- information and data stores, and
- how all these elements align to support the strategy of the organization.
Business architects play an important role in communicating and innovating for the strategy of the organization. They utilize blueprints, models, and insights provided by business architecture to continually advocate for the strategy of the organization and address individual stakeholder needs within the scope of the
organization’s goals.
There are several factors central to a successful business architecture:
- support of the executive business leadership team,
- integration with clear and effective governance processes, including organizational decision-making authorities (for example, for investments, initiatives, and infrastructure decisions),
- integration with ongoing initiatives, (this might include participation in steering committees or other similar advisory groups), and
- access to senior leadership, departmental managers, product owners, solution architects, project business analysts, and project managers.
.5 Major Assumptions
To make business architecture useful to the organization, business analysts require:
- a view of the entire organization that is under analysis,
- full support from the senior leadership,
- participation of business owners and subject matter experts (SMEs),
- an organizational strategy to be in place, and
- a business imperative to be addressed
