Business Information Semantics & Rules - Live Online - begins April 15, 2015

Is your enterprise defining a business transformation led by value chain analysis or a balanced scorecard? Are you having trouble finding data to serve as measures? Are you having a problem communicating the transformation details? These are symptoms of a missing business information architecture. Business information architecture is an aspect of business architecture that defines the terms that business people use to talk about business information, and relates those terms to business strategy, processes, capabilities and organization aspects of the blueprint. Business information architecture also examines the strategic and operational decisions that a business makes and analyzes the information needed to enable the decision.

Business information architecture provides a common vocabulary of business information terms within the business architecture, across multiple lines of business and between business and IT. It allows a direct analysis of the information transformations needed to support a business transformation initiative. In particular, it examines the linkage between strategic and operational decisions and the information that enables them. The linkages between terms in the vocabulary provide support for information impact analysis. The vocabulary can also be linked to other aspects of the business architecture such as business processes, business capabilities, organization, value chains, and so forth. Such linkages support a more thorough analysis of transformation impact. Finally, the vocabulary can be linked to IT information models, allowing the business and IT organizations to jointly plan for change.
 
This course shows how to model strategy and its linkages to operational transformation of essential business processes. Strategic and transformational decision points are identified and their information requirements are modeled. Because the creation and management of information is expensive, the lifecycle, provenance and governance of information may be modeled to support decisions about how to collect and manage the information.

Business Architecture is the application of model driven analysis to the definition and execution of business strategy and transformation.  Business Information Architecture is one of the primary facets of Business Architecture; its roles are to provide the vocabulary for Business Architecture and to link information to business decisions.

 “Without a comprehensive description of strategy, executives cannot easily communicate strategy among themselves or to their employees.” (Kaplan and Norton, Strategy Maps, 2004)