• Helping Organizations embrace an industry standard framework to apply business challenges.
  • Exposure / Knowledge Base / complete picture of business architecture, tying together various concepts, disciplines, principles, and best practices into an overall framework.
  • Help establishing standard for building, deploying, and leveraging business architecture within an organization.
  • Strategy Execution Framework – to clarify and streamline end-to-end strategy execution, an area where many organizations continue to struggle
  • Enhanced industry reference model content for different sectors (such as financial services, healthcare, insurance, government, manufacturing and transportation) that furthers rapid cross-industry adoption
  • Building & Developing Business Models for industries, allowing them to expedite their ability to capitalize on business architecture
  • Formalization of the relationship between business architecture and business process management, maximizing an organization’s ability to leverage the collective value of these widely deployed disciplines
  • Evolution of dynamic rules-based routing (DRBR), a streamlined approach to formalizing, modeling, and automating business processes in dynamic business environments populated by knowledge workers
  • Best practices for capability, value stream and stakeholder mapping to allow practitioners to expand and streamline business architecture’s value across various business scenarios
  • Deploy IT solutions – from initiation stage to deployment
  • Keep on-going Quality Assurance & Control improvement of IT Services

 What is Business Architecture?

Dating back to 2008 through 2016, business architecture was defined as “a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands”.1 This definition was vetted repeatedly by multiple standards committees and practitioners and stood the test of time, incorporating several important elements that established both the foundation and the justification for business architecture and related best practices.

As the discipline of business architecture matured, its role expanded across business and related architecture domains. This increased visibility led to a cross-disciplinary desire for a common,

A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK® Guide)

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revised definition that more accurately reflects the essence of business architecture and its applicability to a business. In January 2017, the Business Architecture Guild® and a number of related professional associations and industry standards organizations ratified new definitions for business and related architecture disciplines. As a result of this holistic industry collaboration, a new business architecture definition emerged as follows.

“Business architecture represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end-to-end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders”.2

This definition provides a more succinct articulation of foundational business architecture as well as its ability to align and synchronize aspects of the business that range from strategic planning through initiative deployment. While the definition has been updated to more accurately reflect the practice, the value proposition remains consistent. The business architecture value proposition is summarized as:

The value of business architecture is to provide an abstract representation of an enterprise and the business ecosystem in which it operates. By doing so, business architecture delivers value as an effective communication and analytical framework for translating strategy into actionable initiatives. The framework also enhances the enterprise’s capacity to enact transformational change, navigate complexity, reduce risk, make more informed decisions, align diverse stakeholders to a shared vision of the future, and leverage technology more effectively.

A fundamental aspect of business architecture is that it represents a business ecosystem, signifying that a business does not begin or end at the boundaries of the enterprise. A business ecosystem is defined as “one or more legal entities, in whole or in part, that exist as an integrated community of individuals and assets, or aggregations thereof, interacting as a cohesive whole toward a common mission or purpose.”

The holistic, ecosystem focus ensures that business architecture can and should represent customer, partner, and related external stakeholders; value stream perspectives that, in some cases, exist in part outside of internal stakeholder’s line of sight; outsourced capabilities; and value delivery from a multidimensional viewpoint. In effect, business architecture reflects multidimensional aspects of a real-world business in an abstract format. Figure 1.1 depicts these “abstractions” as high-level business domains within the business architecture.