What is Business Architecture?

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Contributed by: Gregg Rock , Editor & Founder , DBizInstitute.org, BPMInstitute.org & BAInstitute.org

With over 25 years experience building and creating professional communities, Gregg Rock is recognized as an industry leader in professional training and education vital to helping enterprise organizations support their transformation initiatives. His work has been recognized in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Financial Times, CIO Magazi...

Contributed by: Edward Hunt , Faculty Member, BAInstitute.org and President , Hunt Consulting Group, LLC

Faculty Member, BAInstitute.org, Certified Business Architecture Institute Professional (CBAIP) and Managing Director, Hunt Consulting Group. Providing business architecture consulting and training services empowering organizations to design and deliver tomorrow's businesses today!

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Gregg Rock interviews Ed Hunt in November 2021.

GR: Ed, how would you explain business architecture to somebody that's just coming, brand new, to the space?

EH: That’s a great question. The BA Institute defines business architecture in a very important way: It's a holistic view of the enterprise, it's not just the one part, but the whole thing. And that view integrates and aligns capabilities and the BA Institute's defines capabilities as people, process, tools, and information.

What's important about business architecture is that it uses models and blueprints of the business to facilitate decision making and help an organization take their strategy from vision, all the way through to execution.

Business architecture also enables the key stakeholders across the organization, at all levels, to align the purpose, mission, vision, strategy, and execution and the models are the tools that make that happen.

GR: I think a lot of organizations these days are certainly trying to move faster and quicker to respond to market conditions and I think all the things that you've laid out there are certainly things that would help organizations to do that. So, thank you for giving everybody that baseline definition.

Relevant Courses: BA 101; Building a Business Architecture: Part 1; Building a Business Architecture: Part 2; Launching Your Business Architecture Practice

Relevant Certificate: Business Architecture Professional Certificate (BAIP)

Editors Note:

Watch the entire Need to Know: Business Architecture video series.

Read the other articles in the series here:

Article 2: Why is Business Architecture Important to IT Delivery?

Article 3: How Does Business Architecture Improve Business Outcomes?

Article 4: What is the Connection Between Business Architecture and Digital Transformation?

Article 5: How Does Business Architecture Enable Execution?

Article 6: How Does Business Architecture Assist Organizations from Strategy to Execution?

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