Business architecture provides a common, enterprise alignment view and framework for modelling the business ecosystem, helping organisations outline present business services delivered to its stakeholders (internal and external) and future services it needs to create and deliver to align to its strategic goals.
Let us establish key facts about Business Architecture and capture the must haves for organisations wishing to setup business architecture practice and leveraging the business architecture framework to inform solution design and lead business change.
- Enterprise Architecture overview
- Key concepts of Business Architecture
- Why is Business Architecture important
- How will Business Architecture support your overall Corporate Strategy
Enterprise Architecture Overview
All organisations who have a system engineering capability or develop bespoke applications inhouse must have an architecture function. A typical organisation will have an IT department and this business function will be responsible for all areas of information technology.
The Information Technology function is concerned with the application of information technology to deliver high quality, secure, cost effective services aligned to the needs of the organisation, its business functions and customers. The IT function will consist of the following areas
- IT Service Delivery & Operations
- End User Support
- Application and Infrastructure Support
- Network Support
- IT Service Desk
- Service Integration & Management
- IT Business Partnering
- Incident Management Service
- CTO
For organisations who outsource their supporting functions e.g. IT business function will have capabilities such as IT Supplier Performance Management, IT Supplier Relationship Management and IT Contract & Commercial Management.
All businesses are unique and have their peculiarities including organisational structures. Business architecture practice reside in one of many business functions including CTO, Strategy, transformation or in some cases operations, reporting to the Chief Operations Officer.
For organisations who wish to leverage capability-driven strategy and adopt a business led transformation will incorporate their business architecture practice in the CTO, change portfolio or in the strategy function.
Where the business architecture practice resides in the CTO function, it provides an opportunity for business architects to provide input to the architecture and design phase of the system development and system engineering lifecycle. The enterprise architecture practice reside in CTO and consist of the following architecture domain:
- Business Architecture
- Enterprise Architecture
- Application Architecture
- Data & Information Architecture
- Infrastructure Architecture
- Security Architecture
- Service Architecture
Business architect lead business change and within the CTO function inform solution design and provide the business context to IT architecture.
The above 7 enterprise architecture domains can be categorised into 2 namely business architecture and IT architecture with IT architecture comprising of end to end Enterprise architecture, Application Architecture, Data Architecture, Information Architecture, Infrastructure/cloud Architecture, Security Architecture and Service Architecture
Key Concept of Business Architecture
Before diving straight into the fundamental concept of Business Architecture, it is important to first of all define Business Architecture.
What is Business Architecture?
The Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional organisations (FEAPO) defines business architecture as a practice that;
“represents holistic, multidimensional business views of : capabilities, end-to-end value delivery, information, and organisational structure; and the relationship among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders”.
The fundamental principles of Business architecture as defined in a guide to Business Architecture Body of knowledge (BIZBOK Guide);
- Business architecture is about the business
- Business architecture’s scope is the scope of the business
- Business architecture is not prescriptive
- Business architecture is iterative
- Business architecture is reusable
- Business architecture is not about the deliverables
Business architecture provides a common, enterprise alignment view and framework for modelling the business ecosystem, helping organisations outline present business services delivered to its stakeholders (internal and external) and future services it needs to create and deliver to align to its strategic goals.
Why is Business Architecture Important
The business architecture practice helps depicts a holistic view of the organisation and it’s ecosystem where it operates. The scope of business architecture includes partner and constituents and provides a enterprise level framework that enables the production of strategic KPIs that allow the leadership team make informed decisions, support business transformational changes and align internal and external stakeholder to a common goal and vision of the enterprise.
Traditional approach to solution delivery moves from strategy to solution delivery. With business architecture, regardless of industry or type of organisation the focus starts from how corporate strategy is formulated and how it is represented, executed and realised expanding risk mitigation and supporting business model alignment and transformation.
When business architecture is successfully implemented or the maturity level sufficiently realised (based on practice roadmap) organisations will start to make informed investment decisions, improve efficiency of solution delivery and increase operational efficiency.
How will Business Architecture support Corporate Strategy
The business architecture consist of core domain and extended domains. The core domains include business capabilities, value streams, organisation and information. The extended domain is composed of Strategies & tactics, Initiatives (Projects & Programmes), Metrics, Product and Services, Policies and Stakeholders.
The relationship between the core domain and extended domains provides a powerful framework and business perspective that helps realise strategic goals and objectives.
The centre piece of business architecture and enterprise architecture as a whole is the business capability and the fundamental part of change management is the business impact assessment. To start the assessment, it is imperative to firstly establish the business goals, objectives and the driver of change. The business architecture capability maturity assessment helps build the baseline and foundation for business and IT assessment.
Business architecture supports corporate strategy by firstly informing the new strategy based on the assessment of existing capability, aligning strategic objectives to key goals and refining and establishing the strategy based on targeted stakeholders and key drivers.
Many businesses commence solution deployment with very little understanding of their business ecosystem, business scope of impact, stakeholder analysis and an assessment of their business capabilities. The business architecture framework allow Corporate strategy to be viewed through business architecture, enabling actionable results.
Making business architecture a reality and effective, requires the practice to be sat at the enterprise level. This will enable the concept to be applied across change portfolio, continuous improvement and governance. We recommend, the business architecture practice embedded in organisation’s Design Authority (business DA & Technical DA), supporting solution working groups and governing CI and change portfolio at the enterprise level and supporting the design authority in its advisory and governance role.