What is Business Architecture?

People who want to practice Business Architecture (BA) or learn about it are in a difficult spot; it has become more difficult than ever to separate Business Architecture facts from beliefs, experiences from opinions, and sound practices from declarations.

The field appears so irregular because academia, publications, consultants, and the internet, present Business Architecture in disparate voices advancing a multitude of approaches, meanings, and sets of expectations—some based on internet writings, some based on conjecture, and some based on opinion, and yes, some based on sound Business Architecture practice.  

How do you sort things out with blogs, forums, dozens of Business Architecture organizations of various types, and the internet itself?

1. The essential first question is, "Does what I am hearing or seeing make sense?"

   • We try to relate physical analogies to what we hear about Business Architecture to provide a frame of reference.  

     • We suggest if something does not make sense in the physical world, it probably is not valid in the Business or Business Architecture world.

       • We suggest that you favor logic over what you may hear or want to believe – sometimes due to "confirmation bias."

2. Another good question is, "Is this statement I have just read just a bunch of words?"

   • Nothing is true just because it is stated frequently.

3. The third question is, "Who is saying this, and what is his or her background?"

   • Has someone who says something about Business Architecture (whatever the definition) verifiably ever done Business Architecture?

Below are fact-based descriptions of Business Architecture grounded in logic, sound practices, and principles based on decades of field engagements and experience.

Business Architecture Definition

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 (BA) 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.

• BA provides a comprehensive view of an organization’s policies, principles, services and solutions, standards, and guidelines.

• BA promotes and aligns IT initiatives throughout the enterprise.

Organizations are like physical items. They need the level of specificity of buildings or airplanes, or ocean liners.

Compare, too, a log cabin to a one-hundred-story building. Ask the people who completed a one-hundred-story building how much time they spent on architecture and how much they spent on Implementation. You might be surprised. But we don't think you will be surprised at the level of detail in the buildings' architecture.

If you are building an international organization with;

• thousands of employees,

• numerous products,

• numerous customers and are undergoing constant change to keep up or move ahead of the competition, you need extensive architecture.

Architecture is the baseline for managing complexity and change. Without it, what will you use to address complexity and change, and what will you do to avoid unintended consequences (that is, you had no details in your architecture)? Architecture is about planning, analyzing, designing, and assembling solutions.

We hope organizations would stop using the prevalent life cycle of "construct, maintain, maintain, maintain," which sometimes masquerades as version 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.1.1, etc.!

What is your approach to managing complexity and change if it isn't BACOE Business Architecture? We aren't saying that you have to do everything at once. Instead, Business Architecture is a continuous process with a greater granularity of its artifacts over time as the organization changes and as more of the enterprise is mechanized or automated.

Architecture occurs prior to making a change. Documentation occurs after the change is made. This is the only logical, practical, and cost-effective way to proceed. One crucial objective is to continually reduce the risk of unintended consequences and inappropriate changes.

Summary of BACOE Business Architecture:

• Clearly lays out the goals of the organization, and its critical components and defines them in their relationship with other components.

• Business Architecture is developed based on individual department goals and overall business objectives. Business architecture and strategic planning is the key to planning, coordinating, and implementing an organization’s business objectives. It helps in the smooth functioning of different units in an organization, both inside and outside the enterprise itself.

• Business Architecture is a kind of planning based on the strategic vision of the company that moves from a “narrative” thousands of pages of text approach to a more visual easy consume and understand approach.

• It helps create a synergy of the firm’s various capabilities and guides them towards strategic goals. It lays out a clear framework of a company’s structure, personnel, and business, called a Business Architecture Framework.

• What pages and pages of text on a company’s performance cannot achieve, Business Architecture can, with its visual and graphic impact. Business architecture can document a company’s present baseline state as well as project an ideal world future state.

What Business Architecture is NOT

A great thing about the internet is anyone can write anything about anything. One of the problems with the internet IS that anyone can write anything about anything! For Business Architecture (BA), the Google popularity ranking tool, also thought of by some as a "search engine," shows 811,000,000 search entries for BA. Not very useful.

It is often misused and miss represented by confirmation bias. - the tendency of human beings to actively search for, interpret, and retain information that matches their preconceived notions and beliefs.

The video below provides an understanding of “Confirmation Bias.”

It is not "Business Application Information Technology (BAIT).”

The BAIT model was an early attempt to define the models required prior to systems implementation. It was developed with systems implementations as the primary target and is not based on a frame of reference (a Framework). Its most strident previous supporters now call this an "IT stack." We agree that this positioning makes more sense.

The result of most of the bait models, as I like to call them, the B-A-I-T, is a representation that is very colorful and very representative of something. But I and many others do not understand exactly what it is. And generally, it becomes "wall-ware" or "shelfware." Because fundamentally, there are things that are missing or misunderstandings that are drawn from this.

Business Architecture can not be “agile.”

It does seem that adding the adjective "agile" to Business Architecture makes it now different than previous methods, teachings, courses, or "certifications." This would imply, using the antonym of "agile" that, what they were doing before was dull and slow, and what they are doing now, "agile" Business Architecture, is quick and nimble.

What does that say about the previous approaches these "experts" called "Business Architecture?"

Business Architecture does not fit on one page or computer monitor.

We are not sure why people think it is important to stay within one page, but whatever they are trying to do, it is not a Business Architecture.

If you have ever had the privilege (or frustration) of building a house, you know you get a "scroll" of diagrams (blueprints) for the home. If something as simple as a house needs a scroll of drawings, a Business Architecture will also require at least one representation that needs more room than one page.

This analogy suggests another hint: there is no one "picture" in the set of house blueprints that solves all constituents' or stakeholders' needs. Similarly, no single drawing or representation solves all needs of all Business Architecture stakeholders: the complexity is much greater. In addition, different audiences require different criteria.

• Our primary criterion for business-facing models is whether they are "human-consumable.”

• Our primary criterion for technology- and implementation-facing models is whether they are transformable into solutions.

• We suggest that there are thirty possible Architectural Model representations and, theoretically, 684 possible Implementation Model representations that may interest segments of enterprise stakeholders. Yes, more than one!

  • We can calculate this census of models because we have The Enterprise Framework™️.

  • We don't have to (or need to or should) develop all of these representations—just the ones that we decide are relevant.

  • However, just because something is not made explicit does not mean it does not exist; it is just implicit. If there are implicit understandings, it means there is guessing.

    • But in not making something explicit, we are making a value judgment. We are delighted to understand what we know and are making explicit. Still, we also know what we are making assumptions about (what remains implicit) when we have the framework acting as our frame of reference.

Strategy and Hyper-Competition; where does Business Architecture fit?

What does the Business Architect do?

Many mistakenly believe that the Business Architect does all architectures within a Business. As in the medical profession, a surgeon does not do everything in the medical profession, and electrical engineers do not do everything in the engineering profession. Read the full Business Architect Job description HERE.

The BACOE defined twelve mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive Architecture Modeling Roles, providing precise and complete role responsibility; The Architect roles in an enterprise. There are no loose ends or unassigned gray areas to be overlooked or a source of concern in Business Architecture as it relates to other Architecture roles. Of course, to deploy all of these roles efficiently and effectively, they must be governed by a clear frame of reference.