Posted by Ralph Whittle on Friday, February 24, 2012 - 11:55
One easy to understand definition of architecture was provided by Ivar Jocabson in his book 'The Object Advantage: Business Process Reengineering with Object Technology.' In its most simple terms, an architecture represents one element linked to other elements to form, collectively, a structure. Given this simple, but elegant definition, how would one link an element of the Business Architecture with the strategy? And by the way, how would one link an element of the Business Architecture with the Data/Information architecture?
Interesting discussion, well, we do have many great brainstorms regarding BA & EA, BA is more about asking big Why & What about organization: the value chain, the organizational structure, the business capability, the enterprise culture, the strategy planning., etc. and the purpose of BA/EA need become an effective communication tool, the governance framework or integration roadmap., etc, still, architecture is about bridging the strategy and execution, so if BA is about why and what, then EITA (DA+ PA+AA...) is about how, where, when....thanks.
Ralph, in the work that I am currently doing, I am trying to build a set of relationships into a "line of sight" along the path of business strategy<->IT strategy<->business architecture<->information architecture<->application architecture<->technical architecture.
In order to do this, I define "business architecture" as simply business processes, roles and rules. The info architecture starts with the "entities" such as "customer", "location", "product". The business process is broken down into three levels, business process, sub-process and activity. Each "activity" does something to one or more entities. The entities can be broken down into multiple levels and I am still working on that one. Then each activity is managed by an application and each entitiy is created and consumed by other applications.
So far I am still prototyping all this and working with my client. But the benefits are already evident to the stakeholders.
David
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