Business Architecture

​Business Architecture

Business architecture is explicitly representing an organization’s desired state and as-is state, through a set of independent, non-redundant artifacts, defining how these artifacts relate with each other and developing a set of prioritized, aligned capabilities needed to meet the organization’s goals, communicating this understanding to stakeholders, and advancing the organization from its as-is state to its desired state.

• Business architecture helps in laying out a clear framework of a company’s structure, personnel, technology, and business.

• Business architecture thus provides graphic detail of an organization’s working and helps in planning and improving for optimizing business.

• It provides a comprehensive view of an enterprise's policies, principles, services and solutions, standards, and guidelines.

• It promotes and aligns IT initiatives throughout the enterprise.

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Elements of Business Architecture

Main core elements of business architecture include:

1. Information – the vocabulary it uses to communicate. Asks the question “What”?

2. Capability – what a business does. Ask the questions “What”?

3. Organisation – the structure of the business. Asks the questions “Who and Where”?

4. Value Stream – how it delivers value to stakeholders. Asks the question “How”?

Principles of Business Architecture

What are the principles of business architecture? Business architecture follows certain fundamental business architectural principles:

1. The scope of business architecture is the entire enterprise. It is not a single project, initiative, process, or piece of information.

2. 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, an.

• How well it is done.