A Note on This Article

This article was originally written in 2011, at a time when Business Architecture was still finding its place within Enterprise Architecture practices. The frameworks referenced here — Information Engineering, eTOM, ITIL, and BPM — remain foundational. What has changed is the technology layer that brings these process models to life. The SOA and ESB architectures we reference as the execution layer have evolved into event-driven architectures and real-time platforms. The business process models, however, remain as relevant as ever — you cannot automate, govern, or optimize what you have not first described.

Business Architecture: Explained

Business Architecture is not a new discipline. In the 1980s, James Martin’s Information Engineering methodology introduced Business Area Analysis — defining Activity Hierarchy Diagrams (AHD) and Activity Dependency Diagrams (ADD) to describe business functions (terms used today is business capabilities) and processes. These models were defined alongside Data Models and synchronized through Interaction Analysis, which captured how activities interacted with data entities and subject areas. The foundations were solid then and remain solid today.

eTOM — Business Architecture at Industry Scale

Looking at the eTOM (Enhanced Telecom Operations Map), one immediately recognizes the same structure — an Activity Hierarchy Diagram with horizontal and vertical groupings, extended to cover the full scope of a Telecom enterprise.

The vertical groupings describe the business lifecycle:

  • Strategy and Commitment
  • Infrastructure Lifecycle Management
  • Product Lifecycle Management
  • Operations Support and Readiness
  • Fulfillment
  • Assurance
  • Billing

The horizontal groupings describe the business from a customer-facing perspective down to supply chain and enterprise management:

  • Marketing and Offer Management / Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Service Development and Management / Service Management and Operations
  • Resource Development and Management / Resource Management and Operations
  • Supply Chain Development and Management / Supply and Partner Relationship Management
  • Enterprise Management — covering enterprise-wide processes including financial management, legal and regulatory management, cost and quality management, strategy development, Enterprise Architecture, and performance assessment

As in Information Engineering, eTOM maintains interactions with a Data Model — the SID (Shared Information Data model) — with those interactions captured in CRUD matrices, exactly as they were in IE. Applications and technology are covered by the TAM and TNA frameworks respectively.

ITIL — Business Architecture Applied to IT Services

ITIL takes the same process hierarchy approach but focuses it on IT service delivery. In ITIL Version 3, five high-level processes structure the entire IT service lifecycle:

  • Service Strategy — ensuring IT organizations are positioned to achieve operational effectiveness and offer distinctive services
  • Service Design — designing and developing IT services, including new services and improvements to existing ones
  • Service Transition — building and deploying IT services, ensuring changes are coordinated across services and processes
  • Service Operation — delivering IT services effectively and efficiently, including fulfilling user requests, resolving failures, and managing routine operations
  • Continual Service Improvement — applying quality management methods to learn from past outcomes and continuously improve service effectiveness and efficiency

BPM — Bringing Business Processes to Life

Business Process Management shares the same foundational need — describing business processes, both as hierarchies and workflows, from a business perspective independent of implementation. What BPM added to the discipline includes:

  • The BPMN notation and tooling support
  • BPM Systems (BPMS) combining process modeling, Business Rules Management (BRMS), simulation, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
  • The convergence of BPMS and SOA initiatives to improve return on investment

Conclusion

Business Process Architecture describes the activities an enterprise performs to deliver products and services to its customers — typically following a lifecycle approach. The automation of these processes through BPM, SOA, and today’s event-driven architectures allows organizations to monitor processes in real time and adjust them continuously.

This is precisely the bridge to our current thinking. What began as SOA and ESB — consuming services rather than reading database internals — has evolved into Event-Driven Architecture, where business events flow in real time across the enterprise. The business process models that Business Architecture defines are the same models that determine which business events matter, what they should contain, and how they should be consumed. Business Architecture and Event-Driven Architecture are not separate disciplines — they are two sides of the same coin.