OnKue | Business Architecture Defined


	Business Architecture Defined Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA) represents the evolving requirements, principles, and models for the enterprise's business processes, people and organizational structure and provides a shared domain from which all strategic initiatives are linked.

Gartner Definition

Gartner defines the Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA) as representing the business processes, people and organizational structure of the enterprise, as well as the financial and creative conditions affecting them. The goal of defining an EBA is to ensure that changes and enhancements to process, people and organizational structure are fully optimized, along with the information and technology direction, in support of the business strategy. Therefore, the EBA represents the requirements, principles, and models for the enterprise's business processes, people and organizational structure.

The EBA also defines the formal link between the enterprise business strategy and the results predicted from supporting strategic initiatives.

Purpose

The EBA provides a single source and comprehensive repository of knowledge from which corporate initiatives will evolve and link. The evolution occurs from a fully integrated enterprise model of the business to all IT, organizational, and security architectures. The EBA also provides integration capabilities for software development, packaged software configuration, and process improvement initiatives.

Value

By using the EBA, enterprises can formally engineer solutions that directly link to the desired results defined by the enterprise strategy. These are not “seat of the pants” type business projects, but rather “business by design.”

Object Management Group (OMG)

This is what OMG has to say about Business Architecture from the OMG Business Architecture Working Group website:

Business Architecture Overview (draft)

Business Architecture defines the structure of the enterprise in terms of its governance structure, business processes, and business information. In defining the structure of the enterprise, business architecture considers customers, finances, and the ever-changing market to align strategic goals and objectives with decisions regarding products and services; partners and suppliers; organization; capabilities; and key initiatives.

Business Architecture primarily focuses on the business motivations, business operations and business analysis frameworks and related networks that link these aspects of the enterprise together.

In order to develop an integrated view of an enterprise, many different views of an organization are typically developed. The key views of the enterprise within the business architecture are: 1) the Business Strategy view, 2) the Business Capabilities view, 3) the Business Process view, 4) the Business Knowledge view, and 5) the Organizational view.

The Business Strategy view captures the tactical and strategic goals that drive an organization forward. The goals are decomposed into various tactical approaches for achieving these goals and for providing traceability through the organization. These tactical and strategic goals are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing evaluation of how successfully the organization is achieving its goals.

The Business Capabilities view describes the primary business functions of an enterprise and the pieces of the organization that perform those functions. This view further distinguishes between customer-facing functions, supplier-related functions, business execution, and business management functions.

The Business Process view defines the set of strategic, core and support processes that transcend functional and organizational boundaries. It sets the context of the enterprise by identifying and describing external entities such as customers, suppliers, and external systems that interact with the business. The processes also describe which people, resources and controls are involved in the process. The lowest process level describes the manual and automated tasks that make up workflow.

The Business Knowledge view establishes the shared semantics (e.g., customer, order, and supplier) within an organization and relationships between those semantics (e.g., customer name, order date, supplier name). These semantics form the vocabulary that the organization relies upon to communicate and structure the understanding of the areas they operate within.

The Organizational view captures the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units.

In addition to the above views of the enterprise, the relationships connecting the aforementioned views form the foundation of the business architecture. This foundation provides the framework that supports the achievement of key goals; planning and execution of various business scenarios; and delivery of bottom line business value.