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Business Architecture Guild to publish handbook

Tuesday, November 16 2010 18:42 Jim Rhyne
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The Business Architecture Handbook: Body of Knowledge

For Immediate Release

Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Business Architecture Guild Formed to Create Business Architecture Body of Knowledge

November 11, 2010 – Business architecture is changing the way organizations are implementing strategy and transforming the enterprise. Businesses are applying business architecture to priority business scenarios such as infrastructure investment analysis, merger and acquisition planning and deployment, business unit consolidation and operational cost containment, new product rollout, and shifting to a customer-centric business model. Benefits of business architecture include rapid situation analysis and strategy deployment based on the ability to quickly visualize aspects of the business from a variety of perspectives.

A cadre of leading industry experts formed the Business Architecture Guild to develop the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge. Using the Body of Knowledge, practicing organizations will be able to quickly understand business architecture and begin to deploy this important discipline to priority business challenges and underlying scenarios.

The Business Architecture Body of Knowledge organizes best practice-based disciplines into an easy to use handbook specifically aimed at the business architecture practitioner. Topics include an overview of business architecture, disciplines aligned by practice area, best practice guidelines, knowledge management, and supporting case studies. Topical areas include strategy mapping, capability mapping, organizational analysis, value stream analysis, value stream / process mapping, balanced scorecard development, and cross-discipline alignment. Practice areas focus on business architecture analysis, current state / target state mapping, and business transformation.

The Business Architecture Guild was founded by industry leaders in business architecture. Founders include Neal McWhorter, Jim Rhyne, Mike Rosen, Greg Suddreth and William Ulrich. The founders are practicing business architects who work with organizations to develop business-driven solutions in a variety of industries. The founders hold industry leadership positions in a variety of organizations including the OMG Business Architecture Special Interest Group, Business Architecture Institute, Business Architecture Society, Cutter Consortium, and other advisory boards and industry groups.

The Business Architecture Guild is a not-for-profit corporation governed by a board of corporate, government, academic, and other industry leaders. Participation in the Guild will be available to practicing industry professionals. For more information, go to www.businessarchitectureguild.org or contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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Last Updated on Tuesday, November 16 2010 18:50
 

Tools for Business Architects

Thursday, April 15 2010 17:06 Jim Rhyne
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Do business architects need tools?

Yes, of course they do? Business architects have to have skills: understanding the business domain, analysis and problem solving, and communication. These skills are tools. The question you probably thought I was asking is: Do Business Architects need computer-based modeling tools? We tend to assume that, as architects, we will need such tools, and often jump to the next question: Which vendor should I buy my tools from?

I strongly recommend that you think about your work as a business architect before you invest in tools. This will help you decide what tool you need for which part of your work. I have a simple model for my work as a business architect. It has two parts:

  • What is the environment I am working in?
  • What part of the business architecture process am I working on?

A business architecture project has some stages:

  1. Assumption of a business goal or problem
  2. Information gathering and project scoping
  3. Analysis of the current business architecture with the business goal focus
  4. Synthesis of a business transformation to achieve the goal
  5. Validation of the business transformation with respect to the goal
  6. Communication of the recommended transformations

It should not be a surprise that the work performed in each stage and the shape of the information used in this work is different. It would be a surprise if a single tool could be used in all of these stages. Let's take a closer look at each stage and try to identify the nature of the work and the information used in that work.

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Last Updated on Thursday, April 15 2010 20:53 Read more...
 

Unifying the Customer

Tuesday, April 13 2010 23:50 Jim Rhyne
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Unifying Customer Information

What is a “customer”?

What is a “customer”? It depends on who you are talking to.

Aspect Customer fact
Salesperson Someone who might purchase a product
Salesperson Someone who can be contacted
Risk Analyst Someone who might default
Service Person Someone who can be contacted
Customer Someone who can see and manage accounts and transactions
Customer Someone who might purchase a product
Customer Someone who is looking for information

Using Information Aspects

Borrowing a term from software architecture, we will call these groupings of customer facts “aspects”., Each customer information aspect is associated with a capability of the business that deals directly or indirectly with its customers. Improperly used, information aspects can lead to:

  • Miscommunication within the business and with the customer;
  • Multiple stores of information about customers with duplicated information;
  • Inconsistent information about customers.

To many analysts, the obvious solution is to unify all of the aspects of customer (the so-called 360° view of the customer), but this can be a mistake. The different aspects of customer have different lifecycle properties, different usage patterns, and different values to the business. The case for unification stems from a need to have consistent information about the customer and for the customer to be able to see and manage all of their relationships with the business. Is there a way to reconcile these conflicting requirements?
The answer is: yes. But, the method used to find this answer is a bit more complicated than just creating a conceptual data model of the unified customer and then using this model to define an IT implementation of customer information.

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Last Updated on Friday, April 16 2010 06:15 Read more...
 

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