Business Architecture is Part of Enterprise Architecture

http://blogs.gartner.com/philip-allega/2010/08/30/business-architecture-is-part-of-enterprise-architecture/

 

Business Context

The business context of EA is formed of:

1. A vision of the future state.  At Gartner, we call this the Common Requirements Vision.  This deliverable is typically 10-12 pages and explicitly connects environmental trends, business strategies and requirements of business process and IT together in priority matrices.  This is a conceptual level document that requires confirmation of the target state, and its associated priorities, by the top of the governance decision-makers – typically, the people who decide how to allocate resources in the organization.
2. A root, anchor model. The highest visualization of the enterprise, recognizable to the business, may be in the form of a business operating model, a hyper-extended view of the business ecosystem, business capability maps, a federated model or some combination of these for particular stakeholders.  All business processes, information, applications, solutions, technologies, people skills, people, other entities, are overlaid upon and disaggregated from this root, anchor, model.
3. A set of guiding principles. These shape the investment and action behaviors of all those who seek to select, create, and implement anything within any EA viewpoint.

Unfortunately, some have conflated this business-context package with the work done in the business architecture viewpoint of EA.  These folks have mistakenly lured other EA practitioners into believing one or more of these myths:

• I can continue to do technology architecture without having a business context
• Business architecture is something completely separate from enterprise architecture.
• EA is for IT only.