Resources in Business Architecture

The title of this article may cause one to think about the “edge” in a “bleeding edge” context in that the Business Architecture (BA) represents a new high risk initiative that will most likely consume vast amounts of corporate resources in order to succeed.  One might consider other similar contexts such as “cutting edge” or “leading edge,” but there is another context to consider as well.  In the 21st Century we live in the Information Age which is sometimes referred to as the Computer Age or Digital Age.  Apart from how one refers to

Many business and IT professionals have realized that one simple and easy way to describe the Business Architecture (BA) is to say that it represents the “sum of all business processes” for an enterprise (or business unit).  In fact some refer to this sum or integration as the “Business Process Architecture.”  While this comment is basically correct, it does require a broader perspective and more detailed description.

A less known but highly essential artifact of business architecture is the business use case model.

A business use case (hereafter referred to as BUC) model is the higher abstraction of the system use case model (or simply, the UC model). In a BUC, business actors with specific business goals interact with other business actors. The BUC is primarily an external view of the business model or area of interest. A system use case diagram, on the other hand, illustrates the domain from an internal point of view. 

Most articles written about Business Architecture reflect upon an organisations design within a private sector environment whereby the driving force in deciding the organisations direction is profit and loss. Profitability can more or less be measured by cost of company operations and optimisation of transactional and support activities against revenue generated from customer needs. Other measures such as customer satisfaction, quality, and price of competitor products and services all affect the organisations design, direction, operation and optimisation.