In recent years, two business evaluation methodologies have competed for center stage: Business Process Management and Business Rules Management (or, as some are now calling it, “Business Decision Management”). Currently, there is a new methodology, Business Architecture, which is attracting attention.
Why is Business Architecture generating such interest?
Many of the elements of Business Architecture are not new concepts. Perhaps the greatest strength of Business Architecture is that it assimilates a number of proven business modeling techniques. Individually, these techniques (including business process mapping, business requirements and rules development, etc.) often provide a significant but narrowly focused understanding of the business. Each technique by itself, however, fails to provide a comprehensive view of the business. For example:
- Understanding how a business operates may be very difficult without first understanding the business processes. Here, business process mapping demonstrates the way the business or effort functions, but does it adequately summarize the actual requirements of the business?
- Similarly, development of business rules provides necessary detail about how a business effort is implemented. Business rules can be written at a very detailed level and in very large numbers, but have you ever tried to scope or manage an effort that has thousands of rules? And how do these rules relate to business processes?
- Business requirements are not a new concept either. They are often used to determine, at a high level, the scope of a proposed effort. High-level business requirements, however, seldom provide adequate detail to test whether or not an application provides all necessary features and functionality.
- Context diagrams typically provide an excellent summary picture of where key user and system interactions are occurring, but they tell us little about how those interactions occur, or when?
Any effort that makes use of any of these methods or pieces of information can provide an enhanced view of the business. However, the most comprehensive view of business will come from the approach that makes use of all of these tools.
Effective business architecture development, utilization and management integrates the information of business process maps or business rule models with additional information (e.g., business requirements, business process descriptions, business data elements, event lists, context diagrams, and other business-related artifacts) to create a more complete picture of the business.
Business architecture establishes relationships between previously disparate modeling information, and supports a cross-referencing approach to assuring that nothing has been left out. As an example:
- By themselves, business requirements provide insight into the scopes of individual efforts. When related to a foundational enterprise architecture model (perhaps one based on enterprise-wide business capabilities), the same requirements can be used to manage scoping, sequencing and dependencies across multiple efforts.
- Business rules provide an expanded and/or constrained view of our requirements, and should always relate to a business requirement or a process activity (or we have missed something).
- Business process maps typically identify activities, the roles that perform them, and the order in which the activities are passed from one role to another. One should also be able to associate business rules and/or requirements to the various activities that make up a process. If requirements or rules don’t seem to fit, either some activity of the process has been overlooked or that rule or requirement doesn’t make sense.
- The various elements from context diagrams should place participants somewhere within a process, or we can assume that something has been missed or overstated.
At its core, Business Architecture is a methodology that identifies inherent relationships among commonly executed modeling artifacts and integrates these artifacts in an effective and useful fashion to provide a more thorough, comprehensive view of the business.
