Artifact: Business Architecture Document

Artifacts > Business Modeling Artifact Set > Business Architecture Document

Business Architecture Document	The Business Architecture Document provides a comprehensive overview of the business, using a number of different architectural views to depict different aspects of the business.
Role:	Business-Process Analyst
Optionality:	Can be excluded
Templates:	HTML Others
More Information:	Guidelines:Business Architecture Document Concepts:Business Architecture Checkpoints:Business Architecture Document
Purpose Timing Responsibility Tailoring

Input to Activities:

Define Automation Requirements

Maintain Business Rules

Output from Activities:

Define the Business Architecture

Purpose

The Business Architecture Document provides a comprehensive overview of the structure and purpose of the business. It serves as a communication medium between the business-process analyst and other project team members, and contains the business' definitions of key capabilities and mechanisms.

Timing

The representation and objectives of the business architecture are usually something that must be defined before the very first iterations, and then be maintained throughout the project. These architectural representation guidelines are documented in initial versions of the Business Architecture Document.

The Business Architecture Document is primarily developed during the Inception phase, because one of the purposes of this phase is to establish a sound architectural foundation that can serve as input for defining the software architecture (see Artifact: Software Architecture Document).

Responsibility

A Business-Process Analyst is responsible for producing the Business Architecture Document, which captures the most important design decisions in multiple architectural views of the business.

The business-process analyst establishes the overall structure for each architectural view: the decomposition of the view, the grouping of elements, and the interfaces between these major groupings. Therefore, in contrast with the other artifacts defining the organization, the Business Architecture Document presents a view of breadth, as opposed to depth.

Tailoring

You should adjust the outline of the Business Architecture Document to suit the nature of your business and the purpose of your effort as shown in this list:

Some of the architectural views may be irrelevant.
Some specific aspects of the business may require their own sections; for example, aspects related to data management or usability issues.
You may need additional appendices to explain certain aspects, such as the rationale of certain critical choices together with the solutions that have been eliminated, or to define acronyms or abbreviations, or to present general business design principles.
The order of the various sections may vary, depending on the business' stakeholders and their focus or interest.

The advantages and disadvantages of each architectural view are listed here:

Business Process View — If you develop this document at all, this view is mandatory.
Organization Structure View — If you develop this document at all, this view is mandatory.
Culture View — This view is optional. Use this view only if the reorganization implies radical changes in how people work and how they relate to one another.
Human Resource Aspects View — This view is optional. Use this view only if the reorganization implies radical changes in how people work and how they relate to one another.
Domain View — This view is optional. Use this view only if information is a significant aspect of the business and if there is a need to clarify concepts that are core to the business domain.

Rational Unified Process