As BPM begins to expand beyond isolated projects to mainstream programs at the division or enterprise level, there is a need to engage a far greater number of business people in the...

Business Architecture: Coming of Age

What is business architecture?  If you ask ten business architects, you’re likely to get ten overlapping definitions clustered, to varying degrees, somewhere around the correct answer. But what is that answer? Consensus has been slow in coming, but is finally within sight because in mid-December the Object Management Group (OMG) kicked off an eighteen-month process to define standards for business architecture.

Over two dozen business architects from the United States, Canada, and Europe representing companies large and small gathered in San Francisco to participate in OMG’s inaugural meeting of the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG). The day-long session was divided between presentations on the current state of the art of business architecture followed by brainstorming sessions mapping out its future.

Given the early stage of the group’s effort, it should come as no surprise that there were many more questions than answers. Among some of the more notable observations heard from the attendees included:

“What’s needed is a common set of semantically-complete abstractions for understanding a business so that it can be implemented by Information Technology (IT).”

“I would love to see a set of standards that would let people say, ‘This us what we want on the business side’, connected to ‘This is what we want on the technical side.’”

“Any definition of ‘business architecture’ must be useful to both business and IT.”

“The main challenges are political rather than technical.”

Many key questions were raised that await answers.  Is the objective of business architecture merely model building, or does it include directly-executable models?  Is there a cohesive, underlying meta-model to unify it? Is the target audience IT, business users, or both? Which IT concepts (if any) need to be incorporated? What is a business architect? Or business architecture, for that matter?

Once the general landscape surrounding business architecture is defined, the next task is to identify prospects for inclusion in the new standard. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim. Aside from the Business Architecture System, there are no pureplay business architecture products currently on the market. Most offerings are legacy BPM (Business Process Management) systems that do not interoperate well, with each addressing only a fraction of the broader business architecture life cycle. The market is more than ready for a new standard defining the seamless integration of data, processes and their supporting business rules, and aligning that holistic model with an enterprise’s business purpose, value streams, and overall organization. The models must connect the various abstraction levels of the entire enterprise architecture to successfully straddle the gap between business needs and specific IT solutions. A tall order, to be sure, but it's a job that needs to be done.

While the jury remains out on the resolution of these and many other issues, it is heartening to note that deliberations have finally begun. The next gathering of the BAWG is currently scheduled for March 11-12, 2008 in Washington DC, and will include presentations from selected BPM and business architecture practitioners, including IBM, Metastorm, Troux Technologies, and the folks here at Business Architects.  The full agenda as well as all meeting notes and presentations are being posted in the Internet at www.bawg.omg.org.  Interested business architects would do well to follow along with the exciting process of defining a new discipline, because the final outcome promises to shape business architecture systems for years to come.

Ken V. Krawchuk is a Managing Business Architect for Business Architects LLC, providers of business process analysis and automation solutions (www.BusinessArchitectsLLC.com).  Mr. Krawchuk has served in a broad range of Information Technology roles over the last 35 years, and developed several US patents related to business architecture, database theory, process automation, and project management.

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