Overview of enterprise architecture and detailed explanation of business architecture

Only valuable things are worthy of our investment of time and energy. Why is enterprise architecture worthy of our investment of time and energy to learn? Mainly due to the following two reasons:

1. For companies, enterprise architecture can assist the company in completing business and IT strategic planning. In terms of business strategy, it defines the vision/mission, goals/purposes/drivers, organizational structure, functions and roles of the enterprise. In terms of IT strategy, defining business architecture, data architecture, application architecture and technology architecture is the best practice guide for IT strategic planning. Enterprise architecture is the bridge and standard interface between enterprise business strategy and IT strategy, and is the core of enterprise information planning.

2. For individuals, it is conducive to the healthy and long-term development of the profession, such as becoming a CIO. The chief information officer supports the company's goals by guiding the use of information technology, and has both technical and business process aspects. knowledge and are often the best people to closely align an organization's technology deployment strategy with its business strategy.

Enterprise architecture consists of four parts, BA (Business Architecture), DA (Data Architecture), AA (Applications Architecture), and TA (Technology Architecture). Enterprise architecture is driven by overall strategic planning. Let’s take a 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 at the following three levels:

The core relationships between these five can be summarized as follows:

l They are interlocking, with the upper layer driving the lower layer and the lower layer supporting the upper layer.

Through the above content, we know the relationship between strategy, business architecture and solution architecture. Let’s take a look at how the architecture roadmap and implementation planning links work in actual work.

The key points of implementation are to pin it to the position (left side), document it (right side), and detail work packages such as organizational adjustment, technology procurement, and project research and development. The main links are as follows:

What needs to be added here is that the implementation plan is not only a plan from "architectural blueprint to R&D", but also from "architectural blueprint to all aspects of IT and non-IT".

Regarding business architecture, the OMG Business Architecture Group gave the following definition:

Business architecture is the formal blueprint of corporate governance structure, business capabilities and value streams. The business architecture clearly defines the enterprise's governance structure, business capabilities, business processes, and business data. Among them, business capabilities define what an enterprise does, and business processes define how an enterprise does it. Specifically, it is:

Let’s understand the background of the emergence of business architecture from abroad and domestically, so that we can better understand the usage scenarios of business architecture. Business architecture is the business needs of cross-departments and cross-organizations. , the life cycle of a single small system has no business architecture link at all.

Cross-system planning--the background of the global emergence of business architecture

After long-term development of foreign software systems, after years of practice, in 1962, " This article "Information System Master Plan" kicks off cross-department and cross-organizational demand planning. In the years since, IBM and other companies have carried out many practices.

In 1982, IBM announced the Business System Planning (BSP) methodology. This was an important event that had a large and lasting impact on the industry.

In the years since, business structures have developed rapidly, such as Togaf, FEAF, etc.

The above history tells us that business architecture is born out of cross-systems and pays attention to cross-system requirements. From a developer's perspective, business architecture is the business needs across departments and organizations.

Information silos—the opportunity for business architecture to become popular in China

There is a phenomenon in China. When business architecture is mentioned, information silos will be talked about. Why is this? Because China really started to pay attention to business architecture design, it started from solving the pain points of information islands.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the domestic informatization process advanced from departmental informatization to enterprise informatization. The need for collaboration and linkage between enterprise departments (among group subsidiaries) has led to the need for information sharing and collaboration among IT information systems - and at the same time, the problem of information islands (finance, human resources, procurement, sales, OA, etc.) has arisen. CRM works independently).

Because of the three major disadvantages of information islands, business architecture has become popular in China. The following are the three major disadvantages:

So how to solve the problem of information islands?

Before building a series of systems separately, it is fundamental to design the business architecture and define a unified blueprint. Data map, data sharing, process integration, and service orchestration are all developed around a unified blueprint.

Business architecture is cross-system, so what is its relationship with subsystems?

What do the big V and the small V in the picture mean?

The big V part is the life cycle of the overall plan. In the requirements stage of Big V, cross-department and cross-organization business requirements must be clearly studied and defined. These requirements are often cross-system. For example, the customer repair business function obviously requires the coordination and linkage of the call center system, CRM system, and work order system to support a series of operations such as customer service answering calls, confirming customer information, recording repair content, and dispatching maintenance engineers to the door.

The small V part is the life cycle of a certain system. In the requirements stage of Xiao V, the requirements of this system must be clearly analyzed and defined, and these requirements are often within the system. 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 at the same time. To give a typical example, if a company wants to build an ERP system, what will it do?

Since the plan involves a wide range and many departments, it is necessary to design a business architecture. At this time, the business architect is responsible for the business architecture design and submits the "Business Architecture Document".

The hypothesis mainly involves the requirements, development, testing, etc. of System A.

At this time, the requirements analyst rushed forward and was responsible for the "System A Requirements Specification". Of course, the requirements analyst must refer to the upstream "Business Architecture Document" for the overall agreement.

Note: This is just a hypothesis because in actual operation, it may be necessary to develop some functions of system A, system B, and system C at the same time to achieve a certain business function. It does not mean that it is for the first phase of the project. All functions must belong to the same system.

The hypothesis mainly involves the requirements, development, testing, etc. of System B.

At this time, the requirements analyst rushed forward and was responsible for the "System B Requirements Specification". Of course, the requirements analyst must refer to the upstream "Business Architecture Document" for the overall agreement.

For business architecture to be successful, the first thing that needs to be done is that the architect must do the right thing, that is, have sufficient experience in the actual work content of business architecture and cannot omit it.

On the contrary, the lack of business architect analysis means the lack of business architecture blueprint planning items, which affects everything from investment roles to solution design to implementation planning to the identification of IT work packages and non-IT work packages. Waiting for all follow-up work.

Business architecture = business function + organizational structure + business process + business data

What is the actual work content of business architecture?

The predecessor of business architecture was the cross-system planning method such as BSP released by IBM in 1982. Therefore, business architecture is essentially cross-system planning.

However, the content of business architecture far exceeds the scope of cross-system requirements analysis and covers the larger scope of cross-system business architecture blueprint planning. The reason is that the business architecture must play a bridge role in the transition from strategy to implementation - taking the company strategy to the next level, followed by IT implementation and non-IT implementation.

Yes, business architecture also covers the non-IT part of the blueprint!

Let’s take a look at the actual working model of the detailed business architecture.

From a large perspective, business functions define what an enterprise does, organizational structure defines who does it, business processes define how to do it, and business data provides necessary support. Therefore, business functions, organizational structure, and business Processes and business data form the core of the business architecture blueprint.

At the same time, the business model reveals the essential relationship between the company's products, core resources, customers, partners, channels, costs, and profits. Business model, a modern tool, is also a necessary planning item in the business architecture blueprint.

In terms of small aspects, first, where are the business channels? The organizational structure revolves around departments, roles, and functions, and the organizational structure, business channels, and partners are closely related. Therefore, while sorting out the organizational structure, business architects should combine channel strategy and partner strategy to define business channel planning and partner planning. These 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 generated business activities of an enterprise and is a must-do item when planning a business architecture blueprint.

Business functions can be divided into three levels and decomposed layer by layer:

Third, business process = "main process + branch process + business rules":

For example: when buying a train ticket , the process of "ballot-grabbing-payment" is stable. ,

For example, the branch process of seat selection, window seat, non-window seat, seat ticket, sleeper (upper and lower middle berth).

For example, when buying children's tickets, adult tickets, or student tickets, you need to enter a branch process.

Therefore, it is recommended to define the corresponding business rules while defining the business process.

In summary, the content of the business architecture blueprint should be clear! comprehensive! Intuitive! detailed!

Above we have learned the contents of business architecture, which may not be intuitive enough. We use cases to deepen our understanding of each module.

Give an example of the five elements of the business architecture blueprint

With the help of the five elements of the business architecture blueprint, we can take a look at the business architecture of the China Railway 12306 platform.

Target business functions—online ticket purchase, online payment, online refund, etc.;

Target organizational structure—to build a new IT operation and maintenance center based on the original organizational structure;

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Target business process - log in first, then grab tickets, then pay, release the ticket source if timeout is not paid;

Target business model - buy tickets online, saving time and effort (this is just a value Claim);

Target business data—user accounts, train schedules, seat data, orders, payment records, etc.

Examples of business channels, partners, and value chains

The following figure analyzes the business functions and corresponding business channels of securities companies

The value chain includes core business layer and support layer. The core business layer here belongs to the top-level decomposition of business functions and services in the value chain.

When planning, we often use the GAP analysis method to first determine the current situation, then give our expectations, and analyze the gap between goals and expectations. If someone says this to a novice, it may not be enough. You need to answer at least the following questions:

Question 1, what specifically does a business architect need to analyze? What does it mean to be strategically driven?

--Can it be specific to the policy document? Strategic policy? Market research? Benchmarking with friends?

Question 2: From strategy to blueprint, what is the logic in between?

--Can it be broken down into small goals? Small strategy development?

Question three, what should we do first?

--Even a small purchase, sales and inventory system requires business research first, right?

Implementation design steps

Let’s take a look at the three-step strategy-driven business architecture (BA) design shared by the author.

The three major steps in the picture are very clear and very close to reality.

Advantage 1: Clear strategic driving starting point. The method clarifies three types of strategic drivers (Drvier), because in reality it is one of the three national policies, corporate strategies, and benchmarking partners that triggers subsequent research, planning, and implementation.

Advantage 2: Clear research link. In the first step, a research step is included.

Advantage 3: Emphasizes the transition logic from strategy to blueprint. In the second big step, only by planning the business architecture goals/strategies in a down-to-earth manner can we ensure that the blueprint fully supports the strategy. This step belongs to high-level business architecture design.

Advantage 4: Pay equal attention to the goal blueprint and Gap analysis. At step 3.

The step of designing the BA target blueprint belongs to low-level business architecture design, in which the gap link is a necessary link. We must identify the increments of the business architecture and provide corresponding implementation measures.

The value of gap analysis is that it is necessary for continuous architecture governance. In addition to its application in the BA planning process, it is also applied in the AA, DA, and TA design processes.

The key points are to clarify the Driver and do research

The first thing that must be done in business architecture design is to be 100% clear about what the strategic driving factors are.

The second thing that must be done in business architecture design is research. Through research, we can gain a broad understanding of the company's macro environment and industry trends, a deep understanding of the causes and consequences of the strategy, and a horizontal understanding of the company's competitive landscape and the trends of friendly businesses.

At first glance, the scope of the research is very broad and confusing. If you look closely, there are patterns. There are three main lines, namely management interviews, the ins and outs of strategy, and cases that can be used for reference.

Key points: the internal logic of moving from strategy to blueprint

The internal logic of moving from strategy to blueprint is a skeleton supported by four concepts:

Driver—strategic driver Factors

Goal—Business Architecture Goal

Strategy—Business Architecture Strategy

Blueprint—Business Architecture Blueprint

This is a large enterprise. To advance the logic of how to build digital procurement transformation from strategy to blueprint, I believe it will help us understand the following points.

In summary, the internal logical main line from strategy to blueprint is: Determine Driver—Goal Decomposition—Strategy Design—Blueprint Definition. The logic is clear and the innovation is well-founded.

Only business architects can truly understand the strategic intention and accurately understand the strategic motivation. The subsequent business architecture design work will be traceable, and no matter how large the workload is, it will not be terrible.

Tool GAP analysis

Promote driver identification

The project is assumed to be: a railway digital service transformation project.

The business architect (Zhang San) knows that the driver of the business architecture is the starting point of the entire business and must be accurately identified and understood thoroughly.

Zhang San learned that the driver of the digital transformation project is the "Company Strategic Plan" just formulated by the company.

The "Company Strategic Plan" elaborates on the background of digital service transformation: In recent years, the development of Internet technology has improved the service level of all walks of life and greatly facilitated people's clothing, food, and housing. , travel, medicine, study, play, etc. From an enterprise perspective, actively promoting digital transformation and embracing a customer-centered service model with the help of technologies such as the Internet and big data can improve customer satisfaction and corporate competitiveness.

The core statement of the digital transformation strategy in the "Company Strategic Plan" is: establish a people-oriented, customer-oriented service concept, innovate service methods, improve service standards, promote digital service transformation, and improve service levels.

Promote management interviews for research

Management interviews: It is not for business architects to understand the industry, but to understand the concerns and main opinions of management.

Through interviews, business architects should understand:

Promote case studies that can be used for reference

Research best practices and best cases that can be used for reference , which is also a must-do for research.

The reason is that the best practices and best cases at each stage of the industry reflect the industry's practical level at that time. Therefore, if business architects collect and share the current best practice cases in the industry, they can better grasp the design direction and formulate design standards in the architecture design they are responsible for.

Business architecture goals and strategies include the following two aspects:

Promote gap analysis

Baseline Business Architecture

Target Business Architecture

In the above case, we used GAP analysis to identify business capability gaps and IT capability shortcomings, thereby identifying business architecture goals and strategies. This is a bottom-up approach. To prepare for our subsequent steps, for example, we have identified core businesses that need to be enhanced, including sales, passenger transportation, freight, clearing, and after-sales, and new ones include value-added services. After formulating business functions, business processes, business data, organizational structure, The business model module gives corresponding strategies.

For example: From the value chain analysis in the figure above, we can see that our new business needs are value-added services, which can be achieved through e-commerce business and travel agencies. If you think about it further, you will know our goals. It is to increase revenue, and then we can think from the top down. In addition to e-commerce business and travel agency, we can also be an insurance agent to reach users through the service portal channel.

Promote the determination of goals and strategies

Only by solidly planning the business architecture goals and strategies can we ensure that the subsequent business architecture blueprint definition fully supports the strategy.

Determining business goals and strategies is a high-level part of business architecture design. The subsequent business architecture blueprint definition is the low-level part of business architecture design. The former leads the development direction of the latter. This shows the importance of "determining business architecture goals and strategies".

There are three ways to do this.

1) Top-down: Decompose the Driver into sub-goals and map the sub-goals to business architecture strategies.

2) Bottom-up: Through Gap analysis, find capability shortcomings and identify business architecture goals and strategies.

3) The above two methods are combined, the cycle is expanded, and they verify each other.

Digital transformation of the railway system and improvement of service levels are Driver’s questions. How can we achieve this ultimate goal?

The answer is:

The organizational structure view includes three modules, organizational structure, business channels, and partners.

The organizational structure and improvements mainly describe department settings, job settings, job responsibilities, etc.; partners and improvements mainly describe strengthening relationships with upstream and downstream partners in the supply chain. Business channel innovation is also a common strategy in business architecture design, as shown below with examples.

Organizational Structure The following figure uses the GAP analysis method to draw the current organizational structure and target organizational structure, and indicates the change points.

New business architects often think that there is nothing easy to design about organizational structure. In fact, on the contrary, once the organizational structure needs to be changed, it will inevitably have a major impact.

From the picture above, we can see that in the past, the company did its own IT development. Now the company plans to do its own IT operation and maintenance while doing development. Correspondingly, an IT operation and maintenance center was added to the corporate organizational structure.

Business architects should identify possible changes to the organizational structure as early as possible. Because whether it is a new department, department enhancement, or personnel capability enhancement, they are all incremental capabilities in TOGAF and require subsequent non-IT work packages to be implemented.

Not only that, changes in organizational structure also affect the governance structure of the entire enterprise, from operation and management, to restriction and supervision, to performance appraisal.

In short, although business architects are often relegated to cross-system software requirements analysts, business architects who are truly responsible for the task of planning business architecture blueprints must be able to handle a lot of "non-IT" planning. of.

Channel: The explanation on Baidu Encyclopedia is "a metaphor for a way to achieve a certain goal." Business channels are the ways for users to achieve their business goals. As shown in the picture below, the train conductor helps users complete ticket replenishment through the ticket replenishment terminal, and the passenger transport company informs passengers of train information on the large screen.

Examples of business channel innovation in business channels

Websites, mobile APPs, ticket replenishment terminals, and large screens realize online and offline linkage of ticket purchase, ticket replenishment, and viewing of train information, improving user experience and Efficiency within the company.

Insights: As can be seen from the above figure, business channels are not completely isolated business architecture blueprint planning items. It corresponds to business processes, business functions, and organizational structure. Therefore, we should also consider these when planning business channels.

Regarding channel linkage, some colleagues summarized it this way:

An enterprise is composed of a series of activities and functions that create value for customers. Our business functions are derived from activities and functions that create value for customers.

The enterprise's value chain shows the connection between the enterprise's design, production, marketing, transportation and other activities, functions and business processes that create value for customers. The value chain has two main components:

Core business (creates key customer value)

Support activities (providing support services to the core business)

Continuing to look at the case of transportation company digital services, the business architect, faced with the task of digital service transformation of transportation companies, after painstaking research, gave the value chain division structure in the figure below.

Some students may have questions, why are there two distinct business types of passenger transport and freight transport in the core business module? In actual work, you may only be responsible for one module of passenger transportation or freight transportation. Earlier, the background of the emergence of our business architecture also mentioned that the domestic business architecture was developed to solve information islands. Business architects need to make overall plans, not sort out individual systems.

We have sorted out the value chain above, now we have to break down the functional domains. The figure below is an exploded view of the first-level functional domain.

Next, doing business capability gap analysis, we can see that there are 4 new first-level functional domains and 13 enhanced first-level functional domains.

Through the transformation from value chain analysis to first-level functional domain division, we will gain the following:

First, the value chain analysis model lays the foundation for subsequent functional domain division. The domain division framework for the business function of management support + core business is indeed very useful. And it is widely recognized by the industry, and it is naturally easy to be accepted by others during the communication process.

Second, timeline thinking similar to "before getting on the bus, while getting on the bus, after getting off the bus" is an essential analytical skill for business architects. At the same time, it is often used by experts in the field of Party A's enterprise Analytical habits.

Business architecture design must not only define the target architecture, but also use GAP analysis to identify architectural capabilities that need to be enhanced to prepare for subsequent implementation. Specifically, it includes changes and increments in business functions, changes and increments in organizational structure, changes and increments in business processes, and changes and increments in business data.

What the business model reveals is the essential relationship between an enterprise's products, its core resources, customers, partners, channels, costs, and profits. To put it simply, this is why some companies can do the same thing and others can’t.

When formulating a business model, it does not mean that there is only one business model overall. We can formulate business models separately according to our goals. For example, in the above case, the railway transportation company has three goals: convenience, increasing revenue, and increasing effect. We can design three business models.

As far as the digital service transformation of railway enterprises is concerned, it must be convenient for the people and should support access to enterprise services through the Internet, telephone, and mobile apps at any time.

As far as the digital service transformation of railway enterprises is concerned, in order to increase efficiency, hardware equipment and intelligent control systems can be used to promote the digital transformation of cancellations, ticket inspections and other links to improve efficiency.

The Business Canvas uses nine small grids to build a concise and efficient systematic thinking environment. It is an amazing invention.

As can be seen from the above examples, the business model has the following advantages:

Personally, I think the business model combines the contents of BRD and MRD:

BRD: Business Requirements document focuses on who (customer segmentation), what problem is solved (value proposition), what needs to be done (key activities), what resources are spent (key resources), and what is the cost/performance ratio (cost/income).

MRD: Market demand document, focusing on how to reach consumers (channel access) and how to obtain partners.

The business process view is the input of the application architecture and is also the most practical and largest chapter in the business architecture.

The author discusses the collaboration method of business processes in the article. The conclusion is that simple business processes can be drawn in the form of flow charts. If the business processes have many branches and are complex, it is strongly recommended to use textual descriptions.

Business process definition specification

The key point is the process decomposition in the form of "1 trunk + N branches"

The key point is "staged + step-based". Attach the business or data model rules for each step

The key point is to "mark the bifurcation position of the main process", and attach the business or data model rules for each step

This part is Optional

This part is very important. As mentioned above, the business process view is the input of the application architecture, so let’s summarize this part again.

We found that there is a perfect correspondence between branch processes and business scenarios. Identifying branch processes is scenario thinking. On the contrary, if the main process and branch processes are not distinguished, subsequent changes in business requirements will affect a large area, rather than just changing a branch process. This is so unprofessional.

There are many business functions and more business scenarios. What is the definition of business process? A business process defines a business function, which includes multiple business scenarios. For example, ticket purchasing includes purchasing tickets for multiple people, purchasing children's tickets, etc.

There are so many business rules, how to avoid fragmentation of business rules? Define business rules around business steps, which can be main process steps or branch process steps.

Regarding whether to use business process diagrams: The more core the business process is, the more branches and business rules it has. At this time, it is recommended to use textual specifications, so that the information presented is more comprehensive. For uncomplicated business processes, flow charts can be used.

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 actual cases.

Let’s review the relationship between the concepts involved in the article.

The essence of the practical steps of strategy-driven business architecture design is that the span from strategy to business architecture blueprint is too large, and the logical chain cannot be connected, so it is divided into two steps

If after reading this you feel that through enterprise architecture you can improve yourself and benefit the development of your company, then take action!