Blog 06: Part 01 – Business Architecture’s Place in the Organization

William Ulrich does a nice job of defining business architecture in the reading “The Essence of Business Architecture” but I want to take it another step forward.  From my perspective as a career IT guy, BA and the resultant modeling that comes with it operates at a higher level of abstraction than IT systems.  Rather than dealing with information and data flows, it deals in business capabilities.  If you think of the IT OSI model, BA would occur on top of it all, off the page.  In fact, going back to the Scott Bernard “EA Cube” from way back in EA 871, BA is really synonymous with the “Business” portion of the model.  The technology may be the underlying infrastructure for how information flows and data is stored, but BA is the unifying glue that holds the entire thing together, unless your organization is doing IT simply for the sake of IT, rather than generating business value.  Which, to be fair, is a mistake I’ve seen some organizations where Enterprise Architecture is dominated by IT personnel make.

Starbucks Process Map

Last fall when I took EA 873, I had the opportunity to generate some actual models of business process capability models, so I’ll discuss a simple one here.  As an undergrad, I worked for Starbucks as a barista.  The model to the right is how we would end up processing a beverage transaction.  Note that things are only dealt with in the abstract, we’re talking about transactions, people, and products.  Completely missing from this diagram is all the supporting functions and process that enables these higher level functions.  For example, the registers transmit drink orders directly to the espresso bar.  Based on the number, type, and size of those drinks, the inventory system knows how much milk, coffee beans, cups, etc that was used and can order more accordingly in the next delivery shipment.

The key take away here, for the business analyst, is to not get caught up in the details of the inside of a process step (unless that particular step itself is being modeled).  Instead, BAs should focus on the inputs and outputs of a particular process, along with any constraints involved.

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