What is a Business Architecture?
For most architects, this question seems one of the most hardest to understand. The focus area of enterprise architecture focused on defining the future state business model, organization and capabilities/services needed to satisfy ongoing business transformation efforts.
An Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA) describes the various functions of an organization, the business processes that support those functions, and the relationship among the business processes. The EBA includes the current Business Objectives and longer term Business Strategies of the organization as well as the Business Capabilities the organization will require to achieve its long-term Strategies and maps the supporting business processes and functions. BABOK Definition (V1.6)
The Business Architecture is a set of documentation that defines an organization current and future capabilities. The Business Architecture describes the businesses strategy, its long term goals and objectives, the high level business environment through a process or functional view, the technological environment, and the external environment.
An INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
The term Business Architecture is used for a broad range of very different artifacts and activities. Vendors have introduced complex methodologies, sophisticated business modeling tools as well as meta-languages” for describing a business. We use the phrase Enterprise.
Business Architecture to denote that we are referring to BA in the context of EA-related activities In a number of organizations that are focusing on developing an EBA the lead responsibility is often in a line organization and the EA team, as well as IT, is often not included
despite that fact that technology is often the key enabler of most business transformation efforts.
The Business Architecture is a description of the organization and as such is very much like the blueprint of a building. Its components include descriptions of the organization’s data (domain data), processes, organization, and places (locations).
Its process / deliverable components include:
- Capabilities List/Model
- Business Strategy – goals and objectives
- Business Drivers
- Organizational Architecture
- Data Architecture
- Process Architecture – Business Process Models
- Deployment Architecture
- Business Architecture Relationships