We had a thought provoking discussion on Business Architecture Forum on "Key elements that need to be included as part of Business Architecture". Many industry experts and practitioners participated and contributed. The attached document tries to capture these thoughts in one place. It's an initial draft and will arrange to refine it further.

1. Business Architecture Definition
Business Architectures are designed to chart out:
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Capabilities
Organisation structures
Business systems
Offerings (Services/Products)
Processes
External Influencers
Governance, Risk & Compliance
Locations
Business Architecture contains Business Model, Operating Model, Business Value Streams and Value
Chains.
The Business Model of an organisation will describe the rationale of how a business creates and
delivers value to its customers. This will include the value propositions, target customer segments,
distribution channels, customer relationships, value configurations, core capabilities, partner
network, cost structures and revenue model. Thus, the Business Model illustrates the strategic
objectives of the organisation.
The Operating Model will include service, process, and capability components. It is also advisable to
add a financial component so that the flow of funds through the company can also be understood,
rather than just the data.
When we are attempting to use the Business Architecture to guide Business Transformation
initiatives, it becomes important to capture how the business accomplishes activities. To achieve
this, the Architecture must assign Persons and Machines to all process tasks. This will cover the
aspects of “Who does the work” and “What does the work”.
Most organisations now provide a blend of a service and product. These should be bundled into an
offering. The offering provided by the organisation should connect to the needs of the final
customers. These needs have a desired set of experiences, outcomes, constraints and motivations.
The customer’s needs should be aligned with the outcomes desired by the organisation and the
Business Architecture should illustrate that alignment.
The goals of the Business Architecture
1. Architecture traceability - Strategy to Execution
2. Consistency across teams and use of artefacts
3. Building shared understanding of the organisation
4. Reuse
5. 360 degree view of the business and customer through transformation

2. Business Architecture Implementation Guidelines
If the goal of the organisation is transformation, there are a few guidelines are to be followed
1. Establish the Architecture Principles and attain buy-in from the business
2. Engage the Program Management Office and Strategic Heads. Determine if they have
taxonomy from themes to projects (these will be your anchors and links to the portfolio).
You may also need to help them develop these taxonomies and templates if they don't exist.
3. Then requirements for developing a BA have to be broken down & understood. Also,
relationships to outcomes and benefits are to be built. These will link to high level strategic
outcomes and objectives (including goals etc.)
4. Next is to determine the minimum Meta model for your business, which will support you in
the early days.
5. Then is your life cycle of development, with clear roles and responsibilities i.e. who creates
what, and when, including inputs and outputs (also tools).
6. Finally your policies and standards for each asset i.e. what does good look like and more
importantly what does bad look like. We must think about quality assurance aspects too at
this point. Ensure that your standards are achievable in line with your maturity.
7. Training materials should also follow the same approach (i.e. they should be achievable).
Your goal is to get everyone at the same level, creating the same content, consistently.
8. Storage of assets should also be considered. We should decide where the updated business
architecture assets are going to be stored so that the Reuse of artefacts is achieved and
data-at-rest requirements are also fulfilled.
An important factor to be kept in mind is that Architecture Principles should be established up front
and the buy-in from the business should be sought for all the Architecture Principles. These
principles will influence your future decision making - and will ensure that any decisions that are
made going forward are in line with where you want to take the business. You also need to
constantly remind the Business and IT stakeholders of these principles if they start questioning
decision making.

3. Key Points to remember while implementing BPA
The following are a few common things that should be avoided while implementing a BPA
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Boiling the ocean, do not take on a task that it too ambitious to accomplish
Focus on artefacts rather than outcomes
Speak language that is alien to business audience
Stop at a peripheral level which does not provide enough granularity
Not transitioning Capabilities/Business services into IT services where the most value can be
realized
Doing it for the business, rather than co-create with the business
Lack of traceability
Lack of executive support
Focus on cohesion, synergy, integration and reuse
Not having an easy to use and manage toolset that will make this a regular practice
The Customer aspect of the Business Architecture
To many industry stalwarts, the primary question to be asked before designing the Operating Model
is - What is it that I offer that will be valued by prospective customers? Customer, product/service
offering, revenue will be one side of the equation. Inputs, transformation, outputs, cost of
transformation will be the other side, so that the organisation can evaluate whether it will make a
profit or loss. Capabilities are what are required to transform inputs to outputs. My service offering
cannot exist without customers and without capabilities.
Thus, one of the important aspects is the customer and their needs (including experiences, desired
outcomes etc.) and how these align to the offerings of your organisation.
For many, the first step in building the architecture is to understand what the customer needs to
fulfil in their lives (this validates the potential offerings of the business) and then define a business
model around fulfilling these experiences consistently. The channels required could be identified
easily after this exercise and the offerings will already be aligned to the needs of the potential
customers. Thus, the more traditional approach of identifying what customer segments your
organisation can target is being replaced by the customer focussed approach.
There is a strong case to be built for including the customer in the architecture for the following
reasons:
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Customers are stakeholders. The architecture should include a customer viewpoint as
customers are stakeholders along with the many other viewpoints addressing other
stakeholder concerns.
New Product Development Process: There are many examples of new product development
processes that are cross functional and drive a product life cycle. This thinking should be in
the architecture. There are a number of places that do feature the customer fully integrated
into the way the organisation works.
Sense and Respond (Stephan Haeckel, Adaptive Enterprise) builds feedback mechanisms into
all of the capabilities to enable the organisation to respond faster to customer needs /
requirements (and any changes to these). Marketing should be a major part of this sense
and respond capability.

4. A common approach is to capture the need as a separate concept in the Meta model. The need is
then aligned to the offering. Each offering has its own value proposition from the organisations
perspective. The organisation and the offerings provides a brand promise, your customer also has
some form of brand perception which will be aligned to the offering and the organisation.
These factors will help us understand what offering meets what need. We can also determine what
offerings are meeting what experiences as part of the need. This helps inform a multi-channel
approach, as your channels also map to your offerings and give us a 360 degree view
We can basically take what is used in the Service Design industry and apply a structure to the
content and align the relationships. These are things such as:
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Value
Culture
Attitudes
Behaviour
Desired Outcomes
Experiences
Constraints
These taxonomies can provide reuse and allow us to align to the overall need. We can also include
customer life cycles, which enable us to align the ‘outside in’ and ‘inside out’ view. Doing this also
enables us to create service blue prints and also report on what channels are supporting what touch
points across the customer lifecycle.