A white paper explaining the importance of building an Enterprise Business Architecture Function within the broader Enterprise Architecture context.
All mainstream, industry-hardened Enterprise Architecture frameworks address the domain of Business Architecture. While definitions of Business Architecture may vary slightly from one framework to another, its accepted importance is clear based on its fundamental and overarching position in each of the frameworks, typically at or near the top of the architectural domain ‘stack’.
The wisdom of understanding the business drivers (‘why’) before jumping into solutions (‘how’) is nothing new. Yet for many organizations, Business Architecture often becomes less of a visionary capability enabler and more of a means to record processes the business is already engaged in or document processes that it anticipates following in the near future as part of some project, program or initiative.
Business Architecture, by its very nature, has a much higher value proposition to offer than is often achieved by many organizations today when looked at from an enterprise level. It’s not that organizations are not going through the requisite motions to provide process optimization on an initiative-by-initiative basis.
Quite the contrary - a lot of good work is being done on what one could consider being ‘local’ or selfcontained business architecture modeling. But Enterprise Business Architecture conceptually reaches beyond the generation of a collection of Business Process Models, Use Cases, Class Diagrams and similar platform-independent artifacts. It is important to step back and look at how the models do (or don’t) align to each other across the organization.
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