The True Value of Business Architecture
Information Management Magazine, November 1, 2008
Modern, increasingly dynamic businesses must be agile to achieve a competitive advantage. Change is both a liability and opportunity that demands rapid and accurate adjustments to current market conditions. It calls for a formal understanding of the business that can be modified to produce timely innovation, which can then be realized by operational systems that monitor and rationalize actual operation with business intent.
How is this accomplished? The answer lies in the creation of a strong business architecture this includes models of all assets, their interrelationships and their impacts on operational and strategic goals.
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The constant evolution occurring in business today requires well-defined business artifacts, or “building blocks,” for determining how to optimize operations at all levels of the business. An organization’s building blocks define how the business works today and the alternative approaches that can be taken in the future. These building blocks are reordered, replaced and retired as part of normal business evolution. They represent pure-business concepts independent of technical considerations, and each has a clearly defined function and fit. Together, business artifacts create a portfolio of ever-changing business capabilities - and they formally define part of business architecture.
A business architecture leverages business knowledge, provides value for IT initiatives and ensures alignment of architecture to strategy and objectives by connecting business artifacts into a single whole, which defines what the business accomplishes, who makes it happen, how it is done, where and when it takes place. The building blocks of the business architecture are data, people, function and rules organized by location and timing.
Once identified and clearly defined, the building blocks are incorporated into models to help build a big picture of the interrelationships of assets and how they can be leveraged to more effectively operate together. In any organization - and most especially in large organizations - capturing assets and creating formal models to reflect how it operates are critical to truly understanding the business and planning effectively for change and growth.
Let’s look at how your organization’s assets - or building blocks - can be modeled into a complete picture of a business architecture and consider how a formal, scalable approach to enterprise modeling can help you better understand your strategic, operational and physical blocks, how they fit together and how to leverage them for optimal business value and continuous improvement.
Defining the Business Architecture with Enterprise Modeling
Effectiveness is powered by a formal model of the enterprise. An enterprise model is an actionable definition of an enterprise that both defines and links strategy with operations. At the operational level, the enterprise model includes a business and a technical architecture. The business architecture defines - in business terms - the structure, dynamics and policy that support business strategy. The technical architecture defines the technical infrastructure and artifacts that realize the business architecture in operational systems.
An enterprise model is inherently abstract, because it exposes the organization’s building blocks, while hiding distractive details. There are many levels of abstraction within the enterprise model - the most fundamental levels are strategic, operational and physical.
The Enterprise Model has three major levels of abstraction:
- The strategic level of abstraction holds the enterprise strategy. The strategy profiles the enterprise in terms of its market position, nature of business, future direction and fundamental capabilities.
- The operational level focuses more on how the strategy is accomplished. This level contains two sub-levels. The architectural sub-level defines, in concept, how the enterprise operates; it establishes intent. The engineering sub-level depicts how the architecture is accomplished considering operational constraints such as resources, time, money and space; this level expresses design.
- The physical level of abstraction corresponds to real artifacts. It represents characteristic instances, such as equipment, buildings, people, programs and databases., that collectively represent the enterprise.
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