Business Architecture 2008: Standards, Frameworks and Governance

Business architecture is poised to make significant inroads this year. While business architecture emerged as a distinct area of focus in 2006 and matured during 2007, it is poised for a big year in 2008. A number of factors are beginning to converge that will make 2008 a turning point for this essential discipline including a new focus on standards, convergence of frameworks and solidification of the role of business architecture in enterprise governance.

In 2007, business architecture as a formal discipline made great strides. For example, the Business Architecture Conference Series has seen increasingly sophisticated discussions on the role of business architecture ownership, governance, frameworks and modeling approaches. The case study sessions also took on a new degree of sophistication as companies and government agencies shared various frameworks and deployment approaches.

This past year also saw the formation of a working group on business architecture standards. The Object Management Group (OMG), a preeminent international standards body, formed the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG) to explore the creation of business architecture and business modeling interoperability standards.

The need for the standards group emerged out of a necessity to connect disparate business modeling disciplines in a way that would allow those business models to collectively form the business architecture. Most practitioners readily admit that a collection of disconnected process models or free floating business rules do not constitute business architecture. Creating interoperability among business modeling disciplines, which also includes business semantics and organizational governance, is essential to establishing a foundation for business architecture modeling techniques, tool evolution and tool interoperability.

Another factor driving the standardization of business architecture is the lack of agreed upon mappings to IT architecture. In particular, companies performing modernization of their IT infrastructure must rely on one-off solutions from integrators and tool providers when it comes to mapping IT assets to business requirements and business models. The BAWG will explore interoperability between business architecture and IT assets in conjunction with other OMG task force teams and related standards.

Bringing together a diverse set of industry professionals within the BAWG allowed participants to share business architecture modeling approaches, frameworks and scenarios in use at organizations today. As the industry matures, modeling approaches and frameworks will ultimately become increasingly similar while use of these frameworks will continue to expand in practice. You can follow the progress of the Business Architecture Working Group on their homepage at http://bawg.omg.org.

The role of governance as an essential component of business architecture and, as such, is gaining more visibility. Collaborative governance can amplify the value of projects seeking to expose and streamline business processes, business rules and business semantics across an enterprise. Governance will continue to grow in importance as business architecture concepts mature. An upcoming Cutter IT Journal will provide a heavy emphasis on governance and business architecture.

Looking ahead to 2008, we will see progress on business architecture standards, a refinement of frameworks and approaches, and the emergence of tooling to support these efforts. Tool vendors have been surprisingly silent on the topic of business architecture but their participation in the BAWG portends their growing interest and support.

Continuing to serve as the centerpiece of thought leadership on this topic is the Business Architecture Conference Series. The Conference will feature new case studies and panel sessions to explore the state-of-the-practice and industry experts to share leading edge work in the field. Please join us at our upcoming Business Architecture Conference in Chicago April 15-16th. This event will also feature an expanded business architecture training program, which will run from April 14th through 17th. We all look forward to an exciting year in business architecture.

William Ulrich is President of Tactical Strategy Group, Inc. and a management consultant that focuses on aligning business architecture with IT architecture. He may be reached through his web site at www.systemtransformation.com

Learn about William's training course. 

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