Where Did We Go Wrong?  Business Architecture initiatives can be quickly derailed by a failure to align on vocabulary. A seemingly minor verbiage problem can hinder adoption, cause confusion, and alienate your audience. Let’s examine the role of terminology, the current state of business architecture terminology, and how to prevent terminology from impeding your initiatives. 

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. 

One basic tenet of the Business Architecture (BA) is that it represents the enterprise wide integration of all business processes resulting in the Business Architecture model itself.  Perhaps some business and IT professionals place more emphasis on the strategic BPM initiatives, but eventually; all business processes are integrated in the BA.  In many cases, the strategic BPM initiatives represent key end-to-end processes or value steams; the building blocks of the enterprise.  These building blocks, in a metaphorical sense, are similar to a bill of materials (BOM) fo