What is business architecture?

 

Answering the question 'what are the right technology platforms for my business?' has never been an easy thing to do. For a long time, we have talked about enterprise architecture from an IT perspective as if it were something separate from the business and the preserve of IT professionals who worry about that stuff.

 

However, it is increasingly obvious that our technology architecture sets us free to create and innovate or prevents it. Therefore the best way to make sure it sets us free is to make sure it serves the business and the direction the business wants to go in the future. Business Architecture is all facets of how we designed to work in the business and to what outcome.

 

You have to understand the architecture of the business and business model; now and intended in future, to make good decisions at the data, application and ultimately technology levels to ensure the business can achieve its intended outcomes.

 

Scattered across your business' vision, mission, values, process designs, know-how and best practice, policies, rules of thumbs and common wisdom is a notion of what the organisation was designed to do and how it is thought is best to do it. When distilled and laid out (in a tool like Knowhow Manager) against an holistic framework like the Baldrige Criteria, the unique organisational challenges and the opportunities the business set out to exploit and an analysis of the approach, state of deployment and current results in doing so, allow us to better understand what the business/ organisation was designed to do. It is much easier to understand the data, application and technology needs of an organisation through an understanding of its business architecture.