Business Architecting

Definition

Business architecting is the subclass of architecting during which the business architecture for all or part of the business enterprise of the customer organization is produced.

Goals

The typical goals of business architecting are to:

• Produce Business Architecture.
  Produce the architecture for all or part of the customer organization’s business enterprise.
• Fulfill Business Requirements.
  Provide a business architecture that fulfills the mission, goals, and requirements of the business enterprise including:
  • Functional requirements.
  • Quality requirements (e.g., extensibility, scalability, performance, operational availability, and security).
  • Architectural constraints (e.g., use of existing applications and databases).
  • Business rules.
• Drive Business Designs & Implementations.
  Influence and constrain the designs and associated implementations of the business enterprise components.

Objectives

To fulfill these goals, the typically objectives of business architecting are to:

• Improve Communication.
  Improve communication among the endeavor’s stakeholders (e.g., members of the customer, development, and subcontractor organizations) concerning the business architecture.
• Build Consensus.
  Produce a formally documented consensus amoung the endeavor’s stakeholdlers concerning the business architecture.
• Estimate Costs.
  Provide input (e.g., number, size, and complexity of business components and mechanisms) for estimating the cost of reengineering the business enterprise.
• Enable Scheduling.
  Provide a basis (e.g., components, mechanisms) for estimating the schedule for reengineering the business enterprise in terms of development or life-cycle cycle’s phases, builds, and milestones.
• Influence Staffing and Organization.
  Strongly influence the organization structure of the business enterprise in terms of its necessary component organizations, teams and associated roles. It also influences the endeavor training plan.
• Maximize Quality.
  Maximize the quality of the business architecture (e.g., in terms of correctness, completeness, consistency, effectiveness, and understandability.)
• Maximize Productivity.
  Maximize the productivity of the business strategy team (e.g., reuse of reusable architectural frameworks, reuse of architecture conventions, and existence of example documents).

Examples

Typical examples of business architecting include:

• Architecting:
  • An entire new business enterprise.
  • A single new business unit of a business enterprise.
  • That part of a single new business unit that is associated with a new application.
• Rearchitecting:
  • An entire existing business enterprise.
  • An existing business unit of a business enterprise.
  • That part of a single business unit that is associated with an application that is being reengineered.

Preconditions

Business architecting typically may begin when the following preconditions hold:

• The business strategy phase has started.
• The business strategy team is initially staffed and adequately trained in business architecting.
• Some architecturally significant requirements of the business enterprise have been specified.

Completion Criteria

Business architecting is typically complete when the following postconditions hold:

• The business architecture has been produced.
• The associated deliverable work products in the architecture work product set have:
  • Passed evaluation.
  • Been accepted by the customer representative.
  • Been delivered to the customer representative.

Tasks

Business architecting typically involves the following producers performing one or more of the following architecting tasks (and subtasks) in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and time-boxed manner:

• Business Strategy Team, which performs:
  • Architectural Mechanism Production
  • Architectural Patterns Selection
  • Architecture Documentation
  • Architecture Prototyping
  • Architecture Integrity Assurance
  • Architecture Reuse
  • Logical Architecture Production:
    • Business Object Modeling
    • Business Process Modeling
  • Physical Architecture Production including:
    • Application Identification
    • Application Prioritization
    • Application Selection
    • Business Case Development
    • Business Partner Selection
• Technology Strategy Team, which performs:
  • Architecture Documentation
  • Architecture Integrity Assurance
  • Architecture Reuse
  • Physical Architecture Production including:
    • Technology Evaluation And Selection
    • Technology Partner Selection
    • Technology Strategy Production
    • Technology Vendor Selection

Environments

Business architecting is typically performed using the following environment(s) and associated tools:

• Engineering Environments:
  • Business Process Reengineering Tools
  • Configuration Management Tools
  • Documentation Tools
  • Management Tools
  • UpperCASE Tools (modeling)
  • Whiteboards

Work Products

Business architecting typically results in the production of all or part of the following work products:

• Architecture Work Products:
  • Architectures:
    • Business Architectures
  • Models:
    • Business Object Model
    • Business Process Model
  • Documents:
    • Application Business Cases
    • Application Strategy
    • Business Architecture Document
    • Business Organization Chart
    • Relationship Strategy
    • Technology Strategy

Phases

Business architecting tasks are typically performed during the following phases:

Guidelines

• A business architecture must fulfill (and is therefore validated against) the architecturally significant functional and quality requirements.
• The business architecture drives and constrains the tactical (i.e., detailed) design.
• This activity is documented using the typical configuration for large projects. It is intended to be configured (i.e., instantiated, extended, and tailored) to meet the needs of specific projects.
• The preconditions of this activity should be the union of the preconditions of its constituent tasks.
• The completion criteria for this activity should be the union of the postconditions of its constituent tasks.