Create a framework for Business Architecture and business modeling to promote industry consensus. Evolve and recommend a roadmap for a set of standards to support the concept of building, evolving and aligning business blueprints.

“A formal blueprint of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise.”

Business Architecture articulates the structure of an enterprise in terms of its capabilities, governance structure, business processes, and business information. The business capability is “what” the organization does, the business processes, are “how” the organization executes its capabilities. In articulating the governance and information,the business architecture considers all external actors to an enterprise (including its customers, suppliers, and regulators), to ensure that flow in and out of the enterprise are captured.

In order to develop an integrated view of an enterprise, many different views of an organization are typically developed. The key views of the enterprise within the business architecture are: 1) the Business Strategy view, 2) the Business Capabilities view, 3) the Business Process view, 4) the Business Knowledge view, and 5) the Organizational view.

The Business Strategy view captures the tactical and strategic goals that drive an organization forward. The goals are decomposed into various tactical approaches for achieving these goals and for providing traceability through the organization. These tactical and strategic goals are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing evaluation of how successfully the organization is achieving its goals.

The Business Capabilities view describes the primary business activites of an enterprise and the pieces of the organization that perform those functions. This view further distinguishes between customer-facing functions, supplier-related functions, business execution, and business management functions.

The Business Process view defines the set of strategic, core and support processes that transcend functional and organizational boundaries. It sets the context of the enterprise by identifying and describing external entities such as customers, suppliers, and external systems that interact with the business. The processes also describe which people, resources and controls are involved in the process. The lowest process level describes the manual and automated tasks that make up workflow.

The Business Knowledge view establishes the shared semantics (e.g., customer, order, and supplier) within an organization and relationships between those semantics (e.g., customer name, order date, supplier name). These semantics form the vocabulary that the organization relies upon to communicate and structure the understanding of the areas they operate within.

The Organizational view captures the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units.

In addition to the above views of the enterprise, the relationships connecting the aforementioned views form the foundation of the business architecture. This foundation provides the framework that supports the achievement of key goals; planning and execution of various business scenarios; and delivery of bottom line business value.

Creating a set of standards for business architecture requires a discussion of the types of scenarios or use cases that could benefit in some way from the application of business architecture disciplines. These scenarios provide an overview of a cross-section of situations that businesses typically encounter and a discussion of how business architecture disciplines help address solutions to these issues. The following list of offers some common scenarios that business encounter and the role of business architecture from a solutions perspective.

Business Scenarios and Use Cases

The Business Modeling Library provides a reference library for a set of business modeling approaches that will be considered by the BAWG. This library is not an attempt to exhaustively document the various models because the BAWG approach is to provide a framework of models to integrate existing work not to originate new work.

Please add additional Business Modeling examples below. Ideally, each example will describe the model, how it is used, cite sources for information on this kind of modeling, describe how the model relates to elements of other models and include a simple example.

Business Modeling Library

The Business Artifact Library provides a reference library for a set of business artifacts that will be considered by the BAWG. This library is intended to be used to catalog the candidate elements of a comprehensive Business Architecture model. This model may include elements of existing standards as well as identifying new artifacts and relationships.

Please add additional Business Artifact examples by following the link below.

Business Artifact Library