Concepts:  Business Architecture

We define business architecture as an organized set of elements with clear relationships to one another, which together form a whole defined by its functionality. The elements represent the organizational and behavioral structure of a business [system], and show abstractions of the key processes and structures of the business. [NDL97], [ERI00]

The intent of defining architecture is not to be complete, but to cover the breadth of the organization. Similarly to how we define software architecture, see Concepts: Software Architecture, we can talk about architectural views of the business. Each of these views contains an architecturally significant subset of what would be a complete definition. A set of views could be:  

• Business process view—includes and outlines the key business processes of the business, those that are the reason the business exist. 
• Organization structure view—outlines the key roles and responsibilities in the business, as well as their grouping. 
• Culture view—expresses a vision of the organization’s culture, and defines the mechanisms put in place to encourage that culture. 
• Human resource aspects view—discusses the mechanisms put in place to maintain and develop the skill set of your staff. 
• Domain view (optional)—for organizations that handle a complex set of information, it is often useful to define key mechanisms and patterns to be applied to those information structures. In simple cases, this may already be clear from the organization structure view. 

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