Business Architecture

Business architecture (BA) establishes the company-wide or an organization-wide road map to achieve its corporate mission. This can be made possible through optimized performance of its core business processes within an efficient IT environment. In simpler words, BAs are well thought, chalked out execution documents - blueprints – as the engineer friends call them - for systematically and completely defining an organization's current (baseline) and/or desired (target) environment.

BAs are essential for developing information systems and those newer systems that optimize business performance. This includes a well-thought and detailed plan for transitioning from the baseline environment to the target environment; effectively, change management. If clearly defined, adequately maintained, and implemented properly, these BA blueprints assist in optimizing the work and document flow in an organization's business operations and the underlying IT that support operations. Without complete and enforced BA, organizations run the risk of buying and building systems that are duplicative, incompatible, and unnecessarily expensive to maintain.

Business Architecture is a strategic information–asset base, which defines the mission, the information necessary to perform the mission and the technologies necessary to perform the mission, and the transitional processes for implementing new technologies in response to the changing mission needs. Business architecture includes baseline architecture, target architecture, and a sequencing plan.

Architecture is the structure of components, their interrelationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time.

Organization is any entity supporting a defined business scope and mission. An organization includes interdependent resources (people, organizations, and technology) who must coordinate their functions and share information in support of a common mission (or set of related missions).

Baseline architecture is the set of products that portray the existing enterprise, the current business practices, and technical infrastructure. Commonly referred to as the As-Is architecture.

Target architecture is the set of products that portray the future or end-state enterprise, generally captured in the organization's strategic thinking and plans. Commonly referred to as the To-Be architecture.

Sequencing Plan is a document that defines the strategy for changing the enterprise from the current baseline to the target architecture. It schedules multiple, concurrent, interdependent activities, and incremental builds that will evolve the enterprise.

Business Architecture Products is the graphics, models, and/or narrative that depicts the business environment and design.

BA terminology carries many variations within each organization and in the vast array of literature. Although the term business is defined in terms of an organization, it must be understood that in many cases, the business may transcend established organizational boundaries (e.g., sales, marketing, finance and accounting logistics, inventory flow, HR).

In general, the essential reasons for developing a BA include:

• Alignment – ensuring the reality of the implemented enterprise is aligned with management's intent
• Integration - realizing that the business rules are consistent across the organization, that the data and its use are immutable, interfaces and information flow are standardized, and the connectivity and interoperability are managed across the enterprise
• Change - facilitating and managing change to any aspect of the enterprise
• Time-to-market - reducing systems development, applications generation, modernization timeframes, and resource requirements
• Convergence - striving toward a standard IT product portfolio

 

Tangible benefits

A BA offers tangible benefits to the enterprise and those responsible for evolving the enterprise.

The BA can:

• Capture facts about the mission, functions, and business foundation in an understandable manner to promote better planning and decision making
• Improve communication among the business organizations and IT organizations within the organization through a standardized vocabulary
• Provide architectural views that help communicate the complexity of large systems and facilitate management of extensive, complex environments
• Focus on the strategic use of emerging technologies to better manage the enterprise's information and consistently insert those technologies into the enterprise
• Improve consistency, accuracy, timeliness, integrity, quality, availability, access, and sharing of IT-managed information across the enterprise
• Support the processes by providing a tool for assessment of benefits, impacts, and capital investment measurements and supporting analyses of alternatives, risks, and tradeoffs
• Highlight opportunities for building greater quality and flexibility into applications without increasing cost
• Achieve economies of scale by providing mechanisms for sharing services across the organization
• Expedite integration of legacy, migration, and new systems
• Ensure legal and regulatory compliance. The primary purpose of a BA is to inform, guide, and constrain the decisions for the organization, especially those related to IT investments. The true challenge of enterprise engineering is to maintain the architecture as a primary authoritative resource for enterprise IT planning. This goal is not met via enforced policy, but by the value and utility of the information provided by the BA.

Architecture Principles

There are principles that govern the BA process and principles that govern the implementation of the architecture. Principles help devising rules, rules in turn dictate the organization's behavior. Architectural principles for the BA process affect development, maintenance, and use of the BA itself. Architectural principles for BA implementation establish the first doctrine and related decision-making guidance for designing and developing information systems.

The Chief Architect, in conjunction with the CIO and select business managers, defines the architectural principles that map to the organization's IT vision and strategic plans. Architectural principles should represent fundamental requirements and practices believed to be good for the organization. These principles should be refined to meet the organization's business needs. It should earnestly try to map specific actions, such as BA development, systems acquisitions, and implementation, to the architectural principles. Deliberate and explicit standards-oriented policies and guidelines for the BA development and implementation are generated in compliance with the principles. Each and every phase of the Systems Life Cycle is supported by the actions necessitated by the architecture principles.

 

The Business Life Cycle

The business life cycle is the dynamic, repetitive process of changing the enterprise over time by incorporating new business processes, new technology, and new capabilities, as well as maintenance and disposition of existing elements of the enterprise.

Although the BA process is the primary topic, it cannot be discussed without consideration of other closely related processes. These include the business engineering and program management cycle (more commonly known as the system development / acquisition life cycle) that aids in the implementation of a BA.

Overlying these processes are human capital management and information security management. When these work together, effectively and effectively, the organization can effectively manage IT as a strategic resource and business process enabler. When these processes are properly synchronized, systems migrate efficiently from their baseline legacy technology environments through evolutionary and incremental developments to their target environments, and eventually to prove the point that the investment has been worthwhile.

 

The Business Architecture Process

As a prerequisite to the development of every business architecture, each organization should establish the need to develop a BA and formulate a strategy that includes the definition of a vision, objectives, and principles. The drawing alongside, shows a representation of the BA process.

1. Executive buy-in and support should be established and an architectural team created within the organization.
2. The team defines an approach and process tailored to organization's needs.
3. The architecture team implements the process to build both the baseline and target BAs.
4. The architecture team also generates a sequencing plan for the transition of systems, applications, and associated business practices predicated upon a detailed gap analysis.
5. The architecture is employed in the business engineering and program management processes by way of prioritized, incremental projects and the insertion of emerging technologies.
6. Lastly, the architectures are maintained through a continuous modification to reflect the organization's current baseline and target business practices, organizational goals, visions, technology, and the required infrastructure.