The history of business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. In the next decades business architecture has developed into a discipline of "cross-organizational design of the business as a whole" closely related to enterprise architecture. The concept of business architecture has been proposed as a blueprint of the enterprise, as a business strategy, and also as the representation of a business design.
The concept of business architecture has evolved over the years. It was introduced in the 1980s as architectural domains and as an activity of business design. In the 2000s the study and concept development of business architecture accelerated. By the end of the 2000s the first handbooks on business architecture were published, separate frameworks for business architecture were being developed, separate views and models for business architecture were further under construction, the business architect as a profession evolved, and more businesses added business architecture to their agenda.
By 2015 business architecture has evolved into a common practice. The business architecture body of knowledge has been developed and is updated multiple times each year, and the interest from the academic world and from top management is growing.
Overview Business architecture has its roots in traditional cross-organizational design. Bodine and Hilty (2009) stipulated, that the "responsibility for the cross-organizational design of the business as a whole, the work of the Business Architect, has historically fallen to the CEO or their assignee, supported by generalist management consulting firms whose teams of MBAs work with corporate managers to transform strategy into new business configurations using the newest tools."Paul Arthur Bodine and Jack Hilty. "Business Architecture: An Emerging Profession," at businessarchitectsassociation.org, Business Architects Association Institute. April 28, 2009. (online ) John Zachman (2012) commented in this context, that "a lot of material has been written about business architecture (by some definition), going back to The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) by Frederick Taylor."John A. Zachman "Foreword" in: Jonathan Whelan, Graham Meaden (2012) Business Architecture: A Practical Guide. p. xv
One of the roots of business architecture lies in the proposals for enterprise architecture made since the 1980s and 1990s. Bernus & Noran (2010) distinguished two types of proposals. On the one hand "Proposals that created generally applicable ‘blueprints’ (later to be called reference models, partial models...) so that the activities involved in the creation (or the change) of the enterprise could refer to such a common model (or set of models)."Bernus, Peter, and Ovidiu Noran. "A metamodel for enterprise architecture," Enterprise Architecture, Integration and Interoperability. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 56-65. And on the other hand "proposals which claimed that to be able to organise the creation, and later the change, of enterprises one needs to understand the life cycle of the enterprise and of its parts... the ‘Enterprise Reference Architecture’."
More specific about the emerge of business architecture Whelan & Meaden (2012) described, that this emerged against a backdrop of change. The business architecture is "maturing into a discipline in its own right, rising from the pool of inter-related practices that include business strategy, enterprise architecture, business portfolio planning and change management – to name but a few.Jonathan Whelan, Graham Meaden (2012) Business Architecture: A Practical Guide. p. 2
1980s
Concept The concept of business architecture emerged in the 1980s in the field of information systems development. One of the first to mention business architecture was the British management consultant Edwin E. Tozer in the 1986 article "Developing strategies for management information systems."Tozer, Edwin E. "Developing strategies for management information systems." Long Range Planning 19.4 (1986): 31-40. He introduced the concept of business architecture in the context of business information systems planning, and distinguished: Business architecture, and Information architecture, And he explained, that "each entity class in the Information Architecture is represented in some database and each business function may be supported by one or more systems." In this paper Tozer was "prescriptive about the order in which [strategy] issues should be identified.",Bennett, Jane, and Pam Hinton. "Case study-an information systems strategy: development and evolution at the University of Hertfordshire." (1995). and focussed on "IS adaptability to organizational strategies."Palanisamy, Ramaraj. "Measurement and Enablement of Information Systems for Organizational Flexibility: An Empirical Study." Journal of Services Research 3.2 (2003).
First models The American organizational theorist William R. Synnott (1987) presented one of the first models of business architecture, (see image), in the context of data management. Synnott wanted to develop an overall Information Resource Management (IRM) architecture, and proposed business architecture as its foundation. He described:
Business architecture is the foundation upon which the IRM architecture rests. The architectural model consists of a set of building-blocks of linked architectures which together form the basis for the technology infrastructure of the firm... In the figure data architecture and communication architecture are shown as horizontal bars because these are corporate-wide information resource components. They serve all business units. The four vertical resource components are business specific. The resources can be divided according to the business units they serve. That us, data and communication might be centralizes resources, whereas human resources (professional systems staffs), computers, user-computing, and systems could all be decentralized resources to one degree or another.William R. Synnott (1987). The Information Weapon: Winning Customers and Markets With Technology. p. 199-220
This model of Information Resource Management (IRM) distinguished seven types of architecture: Centralized: Business architecture, Data architecture, and Communication architecture Decentralized : Human resources architecture, Computer architecture, User-computing architecture, and Systems architecture.
This type of architectural model classifies different types of architecture. In the later theories and models different sets of architectures have been proposed. For example, the late 1980s NIST Enterprise Architecture Model distinguished five types, and this was incorporated in the 1990s Federal Enterprise Architecture, which contained four types of architecture.
Base for the total development process Synnott (1987) furthermore described, how business architecture should work and introduced the idea of architectural planning:
The business architecture of the company (organization structure, strategic business units and missions, product and services) is the foundation of IRM planning. Since every company has an existing architecture, architectural planning begins with an inventory of the firm's information resources. Assembling the various information resource components' inventories results in an "as is" picture of the corporation's technology structure. From this inventory, the CIO can analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the company's information resources, particularly as they relate to business information needs as identified in the strategic planning process. From this analysis one can evolve an architectural plan, which is a "to be" picture of where one wants to go and how to get there, not just a picture of the status quo.
Cees J. Schrama. (1988) of the European IFIP Technical Committee on Information Systems IFIP TC8 presented the opinion, that "business architecture is required to provide a solid base for the total development process." He pictured another model consisted of elements such as information processing architecture and network architecture, and explained:
[Business architecture] contains the fundamentals for the information processing architecture, where process data, support systems and network architecture are performed. In business architecture the following can 'be identified: - enterprise analysis: to indicate the business domains - business analysis - Information systems planning There are some basic elements in business architecture: management, organization, processes to be performed and data to be made available/delivered. In the past, when mainly operational systems were developed, the processes received considerable attention. Information was seen as being needed to perform processes. This is changing. It is becoming important to have data available to serve information retrieval needs as well.Cees J. Schrama. "Composition and Decomposition in the Development of IS," in: Péter Kovács & Elek Straub (editors). Governmental and Municipal Information Systems: Proceedings of the IFIP TC8 Conference on Governmental and Municipal Information Systems, Budapest, Hungary, September 8–11, 1987. IFIP TC8, 1988. p. 161
These ideas around the concept of architectural planning evolved in the early 1990s into frameworks, such as TAFIM, the predecessor of TOGAF.
View models of enterprise architecture In the 1987 article "A Framework for Information Systems Architecture" John Zachman presented some of the principles of Enterprise architecture,Zachman, John A. "A framework for information systems architecture." IBM systems journal 26.3 (1987): 276-292.
Framework for information systems architecture
In the 5th NIST workshop on Information Management Directions (1989) a working groups under guidance of W. Bradford Rigdon developed one of the first Enterprise Architecture frameworks, the NIST Enterprise Architecture Model. In this model business architecture was incorporated as one of the layers of Enterprise Architecture. Bradford Rigdon et al. (1989) brought it like this:
A discussion of architecture must take into account different levels of architecture. These levels can be illustrated by a pyramid, with the business unit at the top and the delivery system at the base. An enterprise is composed of one or more Business Units that are responsible for a specific business area. The five levels of architecture are Business Unit Information Information System Data Delivery System The levels are separate yet interrelated... The idea if an enterprise architecture reflects an awareness that the levels are logically connected and that a depiction at one level assumes or dictates that architectures at the higher level.W. Bradford Rigdon (1989) "Architectures and Standards". In: Information Management Directions: The Integration Challenge E.N. Fong and A.H. Goldfine (eds). NIST Sept 1989. p. 137; Partly cited in: IT Governance Institute (2005) Governance of the Extended Enterprise. p. 89.
In the original 1989 illustration of the NIST AE Framework (see image) the top layer was named "Business Unit Architecture." In representation of this model in the 1990s the top layer was named "Business architecture."
1990s
The unfolding Information Age In the 1990s the Information Age was unfoldingZachman, John A. "Enterprise architecture: The issue of the century ." Database Programming and Design 10.3 (1997): 44-53. changing the global market economy. With the businesses adapting, the new concept of business architecture was presented as promising alternative. Gharajedaghi (1999) explained the context: