Introduction to the Business Architecture Toolbox

In recent years, the audience and attention for business architecture have steadily increased. Business architecture provides a business‑oriented enterprise abstraction within its ecosystem, helping organizations with decision‑making and direction setting. The maturity of this discipline makes model‑based design, analysis, and decision support increasingly important.

Views on Business Architecture

The discipline has developed its own methods and knowledge bases, such as the Business Architecture Guild® and the Open Business Architecture (O‑BA) standard’s Business Architecture Knowledge System (BIZBOK® Guide), currently being developed by The Open Group.

We consider business architecture an important domain within the broader scope of enterprise architecture. The latest ArchiMate 3.0 language includes business‑architecture concepts (e.g., functions, outcomes, and courses of action) for EA modeling. Others treat it as an IT‑centric view, placing it beside enterprise‑level IT architecture, while a third group treats business and enterprise architecture as synonyms.

Regardless of the stance, the techniques used in this field are valuable tools for designing and managing enterprises. This view, independent of implementation and technology, links strategy with realization, connecting high‑level, coarse‑grained descriptions of organizational strategy and business models with more detailed, technology‑oriented domains such as processes, applications, and infrastructure.

Business Architecture Domains

Typical domains or aspects covered by business architecture are shown in the diagram below. The core contains four relatively stable domains and several less stable ones, all of which can be represented directly or indirectly in Enterprise Studio.

The diagram does not display all inter‑relationships. The BIZBOK® guide links them through blueprints (cross‑maps). We prefer using formal semantics to establish direct relationships between instances within a domain, a capability where ArchiMate can help. This requires a mapping meta‑model between BIZBOK® and ArchiMate concepts, which will be discussed in a later blog.

Business Architecture and Other Domains

Key inputs to business architecture are the organization’s strategy and business model. Portfolio management, risk analysis, and capability‑based planning support analysis and decision‑making within business architecture.

Other common design techniques include describing value networks and value streams, developing and improving customer journeys, and creating service blueprints.

9 Useful Business Architecture Techniques

BIZBOK® describes a set of common and useful business‑architecture modeling techniques. In previous blogs we have shown how to create some of them in Enterprise Studio; the remaining will be demonstrated in future posts:

Business Strategy Mapping (see previous blogs on business model canvas and strategy modeling)

Capability Mapping (see previous blogs on capability mapping, analysis, and implementation)

Value Mapping (see our blogs on modeling value networks and value streams)

Organization Mapping

Information Mapping

Initiative Diagramming

Product Mapping

Stakeholder Mapping

Strategy Mapping

In the coming weeks we will show how to create additional business‑architecture diagrams and use these models to guide your enterprise. We will also revisit value‑stream modeling in ArchiMate 3.0 and discuss how the language might evolve to better support it.

If you are eager to learn more about BIZBOK® and its practical use, you can register for our practical business‑architecture course and become a Certified Business Architect®!

Stay tuned!

Original source: https://bizzdesign.com/blog/the-business-architects-toolbox-an-introduction/

Article link: http://pub.intelligentx.net/business-architecture-business-architects-toolbox-introduction