It's worth investing time and effort in something worthwhile. Why is enterprise architecture worth investing time and effort in learning? In terms of business strategy, it defines the vision/mission, goals/objectives/drivers, organizational structure, functions and roles of the enterprise. In terms of IT strategy, it defines the business architecture, data architecture, application architecture, and technology architecture, and serves as a guideline for best practices in IT strategic planning. Enterprise architecture is the bridge and standard interface between business strategy and IT strategy, and is the core of enterprise information technology planning.
2. For individuals, it contributes to the healthy long-term development of their careers, such as becoming a CIO, the Chief Information Officer supports the company's goals by guiding the use of information technology with knowledge of both technology and business processes, and is often the best person to tightly integrate an organization's technology deployment strategy with its business strategy.
Enterprise architecture consists of four components, BA (Business Architecture), DA (Data Architecture), AA (Applications Architecture), and TA (Technology Architecture). DA (Data Architecture), AA (Applications Architecture), and TA (Technology Architecture). Enterprise Architecture is driven by global strategic planning, and we look at the relationship between strategy, BA, DA, AA, and TA.
As shown in the figure, strategy, BA, DA, AA, and TA are actually located in the following three levels:
The core relationship between these five can be summarized as follows:
l ring interlocked, the upper level drives the lower level, and the lower level supports the upper level.
Through the above, we know the relationship between strategy, business architecture, and program architecture. Let's look at how the architecture roadmap and implementation planning sessions work in practice.
The main points of implementation are nailed down to the post (left), down to the document (right), and down to the work packages of organizational restructuring, technology sourcing, and project development. Mainly the following links:
One point that needs to be added here is that the implementation plan is not only from the "architectural blueprint to the R & D" plan, but also from the "architectural blueprint to all aspects of IT and non-IT".
The OMG Business Architecture Group defines business architecture as follows:
Business architecture is the formal blueprint of an organization's governance structure, business capabilities, and value streams. Business architecture clearly defines the enterprise's governance structure, business capabilities, business processes, and business data. Among them, business capabilities define what the enterprise does, and business processes define how the enterprise does it. Specifically:
Let's understand, respectively, from foreign and domestic, the background of the emergence of business architecture, so that we can better understand the use of business architecture scenarios, Business architecture is cross-departmental cross-organizational business needs, the life cycle of a single small system, there is no business architecture link.
Cross-system planning - the background of the emergence of business architecture in the world
Foreign software systems after a long period of development, after many years of practice, in 1962, published in the Harvard Business Journal of the "Information Systems Master Plan" article, opened the prelude to cross-departmental, cross-organizational needs planning. In the years since, IBM and other companies have practiced a lot.
In 1982, IBM announced the Business System Planning (Business System Planning, BSP) methodology. This was a significant event that had a large and lasting impact on the industry.
In the years since, there has been a rapid evolution of business architectures, such as Togaf, FEAF, and so on.
The above history tells us that business architecture is stripped down to cross-systems and emphasizes cross-system requirements. From a developer's perspective, business architecture is about cross-departmental and cross-organizational business requirements.
Information silos - an opportunity for business architecture to catch fire in China
There's a phenomenon in China where, when it comes to business architecture, there's a lot of talk about information silos. Why is this? Because the country really started to pay attention to business architecture design, from the beginning to solve the pain points of the information silo.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the informationization process in China advanced from departmental informationization to enterprise informationization. The demand for inter-departmental collaboration (between groups and subsidiaries) has led to the demand for information ****sharing and collaboration between IT information systems - and at the same time, the problem of information silos (finance, human resources, purchasing, sales, OA, CRM, each fighting for its own).
Because of the three major drawbacks of information silos, prompting the business architecture in the domestic fire, the following are the three major drawbacks:
How to solve the problem of information silos?
It is fundamental to design business architecture and define a unified blueprint before a series of systems are built separately. Data a map, data **** enjoy, process through, service orchestration, are around the unified blueprint specific development.
The business architecture is cross-system, so what is its relationship with subsystems?
What do the big V and small V in the diagram represent?
The big V part, is the overall program lifecycle. In the requirements phase of the Big V, it is important to study and define clear cross-departmental and cross-organizational business requirements, which are often cross-system. For example, the customer repair business function obviously needs call center system, CRM system, work order system collaborative linkage, in order to support customer service to answer the phone, confirm the customer information, record the content of the repair report, send maintenance engineers to the door of this chain of operations.
The small V part, is the life cycle of a particular system. In the requirements phase of the small V, it is important to analyze and define clearly the needs of this one system, which are often system-wide. For example, a CRM system is responsible for customer data management.
In summary, the two levels of life cycle, program level and subsystem level, exist simultaneously. As a typical example, a company wants to do an ERP system, what will he do?
Because the program involves a wide range of departments, it is necessary to do business architecture design. At this point, the business architect to take on the business architecture design, and submit the Business Architecture Book.
The assumption is that it is mainly concerned with the requirements, development, testing, etc. of System A.
At this point, the Requirements Analyst rushes up and takes charge of the System A Requirements Specification, and of course the Requirements Analyst has to refer to the upstream Business Architecture Book for overall conventions.
Note: Here only so that is assumed, because the actual operation may be the realization of a business function requires the simultaneous development of system A, system B, system C part of the functionality, does not mean that all the functions of the first phase of the project must be subordinate to the same system .
The assumption is that the requirements, development, and testing for System B are primarily involved.
At this point this time the requirements analyst rushed up, responsible for the "System B Requirements Specification", of course, the requirements analysts have to refer to the upstream "Business Architecture Book" overall agreement.
For Business Architecture to be successful, the brunt of it is for the architect to do the right thing, i.e., to have enough experience in the actual workings of Business Architecture to not leave anything out.
Conversely, the absence of the business architect's analytical component means the absence of the business architecture blueprint planning item, which affects everything that follows from investment roles, to schema design, to implementation planning, and on to the identification of IT work packages and non-IT work packages.
Business Architecture = Business Functions + Organizational Structure + Business Processes + Business Data
What is the actual work of Business Architecture?
The predecessor of Business Architecture was the release of cross-system planning methodologies such as BSP by IBM in 1982. So, business architecture is essentially cross-system planning.
However, the content of business architecture goes far beyond the scope of cross-system requirements analysis to cover the larger scope of cross-system business architecture blueprint planning. The reason for this is that business architecture must serve as a bridge from strategy to implementation - from corporate strategy at the top, to IT implementation and non-IT implementation at the bottom.
And yes, business architecture covers the non-IT part of the blueprint as well!
Let's take a look at a refined working model of how business architecture actually works.
In terms of the big picture, business functions define what the enterprise does, the organizational structure defines who does it, the business process defines how to do it, and the business data provides the necessary support, so business functions, organizational structure, business processes, and business data are four of them, which form the core of the blueprint for business architecture.
At the same time, the business model reveals the essential relationship between enterprise products, enterprise core resources, customers, partners, channels, costs, and profits. The business model, a modern tool, is also a mandatory planning item for the business architecture blueprint.
In terms of the smaller aspects, first, where are the business channels? Organizational structure revolves around departments, roles, and functions, and organizational structure, business channels, and partners are closely related. So, while sorting out the organizational structure, the business architect should define the business channel planning and partner planning in conjunction with the channel strategy and partner strategy, which are the "first class citizens" of the business architecture blueprint.
Second, where is the value chain? The value chain model is an overall description of all the generated business activities of an enterprise, is a must-do project when planning business architecture blueprints. The business function can be divided into three levels and decomposed:
Third, the business process = "backbone process + branching process + business rules":
For example: when you buy a train ticket, the process of "selecting the ticket - grabbing the ticket - paying for the ticket" is stable.
For example, the branching process of selecting a seat, window, no window, seat, sleeper (upper, lower, middle).
For example, buying a child ticket, an adult ticket, or a student ticket goes into a branching process.
So it is recommended to define the business process while defining the corresponding business rules.
In summary, the content of the business architecture blueprint should be clear! Comprehensive! Intuitive! Intuitive!
Above, we learned what business architecture consists of, and it may not be intuitive enough, so let's take a look at some examples to deepen our understanding of each module.
Example of the five elements of a business architecture blueprint
With the help of the five elements of a business architecture blueprint, we take a peek at the business architecture of the China Railway 12306 platform.
Target business functions - online ticket purchase, online payment, online refund, etc.;
Target organizational structure - on the basis of the original organizational structure, the new IT operations and maintenance center;
Target business processes - first login, then grab a ticket, then pay, and after the timeout is not paid, then release the ticket;
Target business processes - first login, then grab a ticket, then pay, and after the timeout is not paid, then release the ticket
Target business model - online ticketing, saving time and effort (this is only a value proposition);
Target business data - user accounts, train schedules, seat data, orders, payment records, etc.
Target business data - user accounts, train schedules, seat data, orders, payment records, etc.
Examples of business channels, partners, and value chain
The following figure analyzes the business functions of a securities company and the corresponding business channels
The value chain includes a core business layer and a support layer, where the core business layer belongs to the top level decomposition of the value chain for the business functions and services.
When doing planning we often use GAP analysis to determine the current status quo, then give our expectations and analyze the gap between goals and expectations. If someone says this to a newbie, it may not be enough, you need to answer at least the following queries:
Query 1, what specifically does a business architect analyze? What makes it strategy-driven?
- Can it be specific to a policy document? Strategic guidelines? Market research? Friendly benchmarking?
Question two, from strategy to blueprint, what is the logic in between?
-- Can it be specific to the breakdown of small goals? Small strategy development?
Question three, what should we do first?
- Even a small inventory system requires business research first, doesn't it?
Steps to Landed Design
Let's take a look at the three-step approach to strategy-driven business architecture (BA) design shared by the authors.
The three major steps in the diagram are clear and very relevant.
Benefit 1: Clear starting point for strategy drivers. The methodology specifies three types of strategic drivers (Drvier), because in practice it is one of the three - national policy, corporate strategy, or benchmarking against friends - that triggers the subsequent research, planning and implementation.
Advantage 2: Clear research session. The research session is included in the first step.
Benefit 3: Emphasizes the logic of the transition from strategy to blueprint. In the 2nd major step, a solid planning of business architecture goals/strategies is required to ensure that the blueprints fully support the strategy. This step is part of high-level business architecture design.
Benefit #4: Objective blueprinting goes hand-in-hand with Gap analysis. In the 3rd major step.
The step of designing the BA goal blueprints belongs to the low-level business architecture design, where the Gap session is a mandatory session, where we have to identify what are the incremental aspects of the business architecture and give the corresponding implementation measures.
The value of Gap analysis is that it is necessary for ongoing architectural governance, and is used not only in BA planning, but also in AA, DA, and TA design.
Key points to clarify Driver, do research
The first thing you need to do for business architecture design is to be 100% clear on what the strategic drivers are.
The second thing that business architecture design must do is research.
The second thing that business architecture design must do well is research.
Through research, we can understand the macro-environment of the enterprise and industry trends in the breadth of the research, and understand the causes and consequences of the strategy in the depth of the research, the ins and outs, and the horizontal understanding of the enterprise's competitive landscape, and the movement of the friends.
Roughly speaking, the scope of the research is very broad, so people can not make sense of it. However, if you look closely, there is a pattern, the main three lines, respectively, management interviews, the ins and outs of the strategy, and can learn from the case.
Key points from the strategy to the blueprint of the internal logic
From the strategy to the blueprint of the internal logic of the skeleton supported by four concepts:
Driver-strategy drivers
Goal-business architecture goals.
Strategy-Business Architecture Strategy
Blueprint-Business Architecture Blueprint
This is the logic of how to build a strategy to a blueprint for advancing digital sourcing transformation in a large organization, and I believe that it helps us to understand the following points.
In summary, the main line of logic inherent in the strategy to blueprint is: Determine Driver - Goal Decomposition - Strategy Design - Blueprint Definition . The logic is clear and the innovation is based on it.
Only if the business architect has a true understanding of the strategic intent, and accurately comprehends the strategic motivation, then the subsequent business architecture design work is traceable, and the workload is no longer too heavy, but also not terrible.
Tool GAP analysis
Advancing to identify Driver
The project is assumed to be: a railroad digital service transformation project.
The business architect (Zhang San) knows that the Driver of the business architecture is the starting point of the whole business and must be found and eaten up.
Zhang San learns that the Driver for the digital transformation project is the Corporate Strategic Plan that the company has just developed.
The Company Strategic Plan describes the background of the digital service transformation: in recent years, the development of Internet technology has improved the level of service in all walks of life, greatly facilitating the people's masses of clothing, food, housing, transportation, medical, learning, playing and other aspects. From the perspective of enterprises, with the help of the Internet, big data and other technologies, actively promote digital transformation, embrace the customer-centric service model, can improve customer satisfaction and enterprise competitiveness.
The core statement of the Company's strategic plan and digital transformation strategy is: establish a people-oriented, customer-first service concept, innovate service methods, improve service standards, promote digital service transformation, and improve service levels.
Promoting good research management interviews
Management interviews: not for business architects to understand the industry, but to understand the management's concerns, the main views.
Through interviews, business architects should understand:
Advancing the case studies that can be used for good research
Researching the best practices and best cases that can be used for good research is also a must-do for research.
The reason for this is that the best practices and best cases at each stage of the industry reflect the level of practice in the industry at that time. So, if a business architect collects and distributes the industry's current best practices, he or she will be able to better grasp the design direction and set design standards in the architecture design that he or she is responsible for.
Business Architecture Goals and Strategies include the following:
Advancing the Gap Analysis
Baseline Business Architecture
Target Business Architecture
Target Business Architecture
In the above case study, we identified business capability gaps and IT capability shortfalls through GAP analysis to identify business architecture targets and strategies, which was done using a bottom-up approach. To prepare for our subsequent sessions, for example, we identified the core business needs to be enhanced including sales, passenger, freight, clearing, after-sales, new including value-added services, in the formulation of business functions, business processes, business data, organizational structure, business model module to give the corresponding strategy.
Such as: from the value chain analysis of the above chart, we see that the new business needs are value-added business, through the e-commerce business, travel agency can be realized, and then further think about it, you will know that our goal is to increase revenue, and then you can think from the top down, increase revenue in addition to the e-commerce business, travel agency, we can also do the insurance agency, through the service portal as a channel to reach the user.
Advance in defining goals and strategies
Only solid planning of business architecture goals and strategies can ensure that subsequent business architecture blueprint definitions fully support the strategy.
Defining business goals and strategy is a high-level part of business architecture design. The subsequent definition of the business architecture blueprint is the lower level of business architecture design. The former leads the way for the latter. This shows the importance of the "Define Business Architecture Goals and Strategy" session.
There are three approaches to this step.
1) Top-down: Decompose Driver into sub-goals, and map the sub-goals to the business architecture strategy.
2) Bottom-up: Find the capability shortfalls through Gap analysis, from the ability to identify business architecture goals and strategies.
3) Combination of the above two practices, cyclic development, mutual validation.
The digital transformation of the railroad system to improve service levels is Driver, how can we achieve this ultimate goal.
The answer is:
The Organizational Structure View includes three modules, Organizational Structure, Business Channels, and Partners.
Organizational Structure and Improvement mainly describes the departmental settings, job settings, job responsibilities, etc.; Partners and Improvement mainly describes the strengthening of the relationship with partners upstream and downstream of the supply chain. Business channel innovation is also a common strategy in business architecture design, and examples will be given below.
Organizational Structure The following figure draws the current organizational structure and target organizational structure using GAP analysis, and indicates the change points.
Novice business architects tend to think that there is no such thing as an organizational structure. In fact, the opposite is true: when an organization needs to change, the impact will be significant.
From the chart above, we can see that before the enterprise to do their own IT development, the current company plans to do development at the same time, they also do IT operations and maintenance. Accordingly, the enterprise organizational structure of the new IT operations and maintenance center.
Business architects should be clear about possible changes to the organizational structure as early as possible. This is because both new departments, departmental enhancements, and staff capacity enhancements belong to the capacity increment in TOGAF, and are required to be realized by subsequent non-IT work packages.
Not only that, but changes in organizational structure also affect the governance structure of the entire enterprise, from operational management, to constraints on supervision, to performance appraisal.
In short, while business architects are often relegated to use as cross-system software requirements analysts, business architects who are actually tasked with business architecture blueprinting must be able to carry out a lot of "non-IT" planning.
Channel: Baidu encyclopedia on the explanation is "a metaphor for the way to achieve a certain purpose", the business channel is the user in order to achieve the business purpose of the way. As you can see in the picture below, the conductor helps the user to complete the replenishment of tickets through a channel called the replenishment terminal, and the passenger transportation company informs the passengers of the number of trips through the big screen.
Business Channels Examples of Business Channel Innovation
The website, mobile APP, ticket replacement terminals, and the big screen realize the online and offline linkage of purchasing, replenishing, and checking the bus information, which improves the user experience and the internal efficiency of the company.
Insights: From the above figure, we can see that the business channel is not completely isolated from the business architecture blueprint planning project. It echoes business processes, business functions, and organizational structures. Therefore, when we plan business channels, we should consider these as well.
Regarding channel linkage, a colleague summarized it this way:
A business is made up of a set of activities and functions that create value for customers. Our business functions are derived from the activities and functions that can create value for customers.
The value chain of a business demonstrates the connections between the set of activities, functions, and business processes that create value for customers, such as design, production, marketing, and transportation. The value chain has two main components:
The core business (which creates the main customer value)
Supporting activities (which provide support services to the core business)
Moving on to the case of digital services in a transportation company, the business architects, faced with the task of transforming a transportation company into a digital services company, after a lot of delving into the business, have come up with a value chain segmentation structure in the figure below.
Some students may have questions about why there are two widely differentiated business types, passenger and freight, in the core business module at the same time. In practice, you may be responsible for only one of the modules of passenger transportation and freight transportation. The background of the emergence of our business architecture has also mentioned that in China business architecture is to solve the development of information silos. The business architect is to do planning in the overall situation, rather than combing individual systems.
Above we have organized the value chain, now we have to decompose the functional domain. The diagram below shows the first level of functional domain decomposition.
Next, doing a Business Capability Gap Analysis, we can see that there are 4 new Level 1 Functional Domains and 13 enhanced Level 1 Functional Domains.
Through the shift from value chain analysis to Tier 1 functional domain segmentation, we will have the following gains:
First, the value chain analysis model lays the foundation for subsequent functional domain segmentation. Management support + core business this business function domain division framework is really very good to use. It is widely recognized in the industry, and naturally accepted by others in the communication process.
Second, similar to the "get on the car before, get on the car, get off the car after" timeline thinking, is the business architects must analyze skills, at the same time, is the A side of the business domain experts often use the analysis habits.
Business architecture design should not only define the target architecture, but also use GAP analysis to identify the need to enhance the architectural capabilities for the subsequent implementation of the preparation. Specifically, this includes business function changes and increments, organizational structure changes and increments, business process changes and increments, and business data changes and increments.
The business model reveals the essential relationship between enterprise products, enterprise core resources, customers, partners, channels, costs, and profits. Simply put, it is why the same thing, some companies can, some companies can not.
Developing a business model does not mean that there is only one business model across the board, we can develop business models according to our goals, such as the above case, the railroad transportation company has three goals: convenience, revenue, efficiency. We can then design three business models.
In terms of the digital service transformation of the railroad company, to facilitate the people, it should support access to corporate services at any time through the network, telephone, cell phone App.
In terms of the digital service transformation of railroad enterprises, to increase efficiency, we can use hardware equipment and intelligent control systems to promote the digital transformation of cancellation, ticketing and other aspects of the process to improve efficiency.
Sense of Business Canvas, with the help of nine small grids, builds the profile efficient systematic thinking environment, is a remarkable invention.
From the above example, we can see that the business model has the following advantages:
Personally, I believe that the business model integrates BRD and MRD:
BRD: Business Requirements Document, focusing on for whom (customer segmentation), what problem is being solved (value proposition), what needs to be done (key activities), what is being spent (key resources), and what is the price/performance ratio (costs /revenue).
MRD: Market Requirements Document, focusing on how to reach consumers (channel path), how to get partners.
The Business Process View is the input to the Application Architecture and is the most grounded and lengthy chapter of the Business Architecture.
In the article, the authors discuss the collaborative approach to business processes, concluding that simple business processes can be drawn using flowcharts, and textualized descriptions are strongly recommended for business processes with many branches and complexity.
Specification of business process definition
The main point is the process decomposition in the way of "1 trunk + N branches"
The main point is the "phasing + step by step" with each step of the business or data model rules
The main point is to "indicate that in the business process, the business process can be described in the form of a flowchart.
This part is optional
This part is very important, as mentioned above, the business process view is an input to the application architecture, so summarize this part again.
We found that there is a perfect correspondence between branching processes and business scenarios. Identifying branch processes is scenario-based thinking. On the contrary, if you don't distinguish between trunk processes and branch processes, subsequent changes in business requirements will affect a large area, rather than changing a branch process is so simple. This is too unprofessional.
A lot of business functions, business scenarios are more, what is the business process definition? Business process defines a business function, which includes multiple business scenarios. For example, ticketing includes the purchase of tickets for multiple people, the purchase of children's tickets, and so on.
There are many business rules, how to avoid fragmentation of business rules? Define business rules around business steps, which can be trunk process steps, branch process steps.
On whether to use business process maps: the more core business processes, the more branches, business rules, at this time it is recommended to use text-based specification, so that the information presented is more comprehensive. Uncomplicated business processes can follow the flowchart approach.
This article provides an overview of enterprise architecture, details the background and practical strategies for the emergence of business architecture, and deepens our understanding of business architecture through practical examples.
Let's review together the relationships between the concepts covered in the article.
The essence of the strategy-driven business footprint design practical steps is that the span from strategy to business architecture blueprints is too large for the logical chain to catch the air, so it is divided into two steps
If you feel that after reading it, you can improve yourself and benefit the development of your company through enterprise architecture, take action!