Launching a Business Architecture Community of Practice

Business Architecture (BA) is no longer just an emerging discipline or an “interesting concept”.  It is increasingly being leveraged by enterprises to provide tangible value.  And within Wells Fargo, Business Architecture has been gaining momentum, slowly but surely, through the activities of a growing BA community, involved in numerous efforts in or related to Business Architecture.

First, let’s define Business Architecture. The following is a consolidation of several definitions that have been around in the industry, and it captures quite well the quintessence of BA:

Business Architecture is a disciplined approach to creating and maintaining business-specific artifacts that serve as a formal blueprint for the planning and execution of strategy across the enterprise.

BA covers the following major areas:

• Governance Structures – Business context and organizational views showing relationships among roles, functions, and business units, and their internal or external management.
• Capabilities – Consistent, concise view of the particular abilities that a business possesses to enable value streams and achieve specific outcomes.
• Business Semantics - Information about all business entities that the organization depends on to communicate and structure the understanding of the areas they operate within. It includes the enterprise’s vision, mission, strategies, goals, offerings, customers, channels, costs, revenues, resources, principles, policies, rules, events, etc.
• Value Streams - End-to-end collection of activities that deliver value to enterprise’s main constituents – customers, shareholders, employees and partners. It includes functions, capabilities, processes, operations, etc.

The overall value of BA is in establishing a framework to create, manage, and communicate key business aspects that serve as a foundation of the enterprise to operationalize strategy, enhance accountability and improve decision-making. Dominant BA activities, both in Wells Fargo as well as in the industry, have been centered on business capabilities, processes, and rules – their modeling, mapping, evaluation, monitoring, etc. – with gradual branching out to other areas of BA, such as modeling organizations, governance, and key business entities.

In December 2011, after conferring with key BA practitioners within Wells Fargo, the Enterprise Architecture group kicked off the formation of a BA Core Group to serve the existing BA community in Wells Fargo. The response at the kickoff session was extremely encouraging, and since then the Core Group has been finalized to six members assigned to various committees. The prime purpose of the Core Group, of course, is to support the Wells Fargo community of BA practitioners, consumers, and enthusiasts, and advance the practice of business architecture within Wells Fargo. Specifics are shown in the following figure:

Role of Business Architecture Core Group

 One of the first goals of the BA Core Group is to clarify the field of BA, particularly its relationship to other domains that have been around for a lot longer, such as Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Rules Management (BRM). Both BPM and BRM have had active communities of practice within the industry (and also in Wells Fargo). Their main focus, however, has been on the evaluation and use of the vendor tools for accomplishing various aspects of these areas. The “business” aspects of BPM and BRM often get shadowed or neglected resulting in technology tool driven solutions to business problems.

Given that both business processes and rules are key components of business (see BA definition on page 1), one of our goals is to position BA as the overarching discipline that includes the existing efforts in BPM and BRM, especially the “business” aspects of those disciplines. Consequently, we are in the process of consolidating the existing BPM and BRM communities under the umbrella of the BA community of practice.

Following are some of the highlights of the BA Core Group since its kick-off last December:

• Established an official site for the BA community to serve as the virtual meeting place and resource for everything related to BA practice across Wells Fargo - case studies, business cases, best practices, standards, methods, client testimonials, lessons learned, etc.
• Published a detailed annual plan outlining the objectives and deliverables of the Core Group.
• Prepared materials for a BA overview, including a detailed context model showing the state of BA in Wells Fargo, and a working dashboard to monitor the various BA efforts in Wells Fargo.
• Monthly meetings to share and discuss case studies, best practices, issues, etc. 
• Currently working on finalizing a strategy and position statement for BA in Wells Fargo.
• Started consolidation of the BPM and BRM communities of practice in Wells Fargo with the overarching BA community.