1. For companies, enterprise architecture can help them complete business and IT strategic planning. As far as business strategy is concerned, it defines the vision/mission, goals/objectives/driving forces, organizational structure, functions and roles of an enterprise. In 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 business strategy and IT strategy, and it is the core of enterprise information planning.
2. For an individual, it contributes to the healthy and long-term development of his career, such as becoming a CIO. The CIO supports the company's goals by guiding the use of information technology, and understands the technology and business processes. He is usually the best person to closely integrate the organization's technology deployment strategy with the business strategy.
Enterprise architecture includes four parts, BA (business architecture), DA (data architecture), AA (application architecture) and ta (technical architecture). Enterprise architecture is driven by overall strategic planning. Let's TAke a look at the relationship among strategy, BA, DA, AA and ta.
As shown in the figure, policy, BA, DA, AA and TA are actually located at the following three levels:
The core relationship between the five can be summarized as follows:
L interlocking, the upper layer drives the lower layer, and the lower layer supports the upper layer.
Through the above, we know the relationship among strategy, business architecture and solution architecture. Let's take a look at how the architecture roadmap and implementation planning link operate in practical work.
The focus of execution is fixed on the post (left) and falls on the document (right), and it is refined into work packages such as institutional adjustment, technology procurement and project research and development. There are mainly the following links:
What needs to be added here is that the implementation plan is not only a plan from architectural blueprint to R&D, but also a plan from architectural blueprint to IT and non-IT aspects.
For business architecture, OMG Business Architecture Group gives the following definitions:
Business architecture is the formal blueprint of corporate governance structure, business capability and value flow. The business architecture clearly defines the corporate governance structure, business capabilities, business processes and business data. Among them, business capability defines what the enterprise does, and business process defines how the enterprise does it. Specifically, it is:
Let's take a look at the background of business architecture from abroad and at home, so that we can better understand the usage scenarios of business architecture. Business architecture is a cross-departmental and cross-organizational business requirement, and there is no business architecture link in the life cycle of a single small system.
Cross-system Planning —— The Background of Commercial Building in the World
After long-term development and years of practice of foreign software systems, 1962 published in Harvard Business Journal, the article "Information System Master Plan" opened the prelude to cross-departmental and cross-organizational requirements planning. Many years later, companies such as IBM have done a lot of practice.
1982, IBM published Business System Planning Methodology (BSP). This is an important event and has a huge and lasting impact on the industry.
Since then, business architectures have developed rapidly, such as Togaf and FEAF.
The above history tells us that the business architecture is born out of cross-system and attaches importance to cross-system requirements. From the developer's point of view, business architecture is a cross-departmental and cross-organizational business requirement.
Information Island —— Opportunity for Commercial Buildings to "Fire" in China
There is a phenomenon in China that when it comes to business architecture, it will talk about information islands. Why is this? Because China really began to pay attention to business architecture design, it started from solving the pain point of information isolated island.
2/kloc-0 At the beginning of the century, the domestic informatization process was promoted from departmental informatization to enterprise informatization. The demand for collaborative linkage between enterprise departments (among subsidiaries of the group) has driven the demand for information sharing and collaborative linkage between IT information systems-at the same time, the problem of information islands has arisen (finance, human resources, procurement, sales, OA, CRM go their own way).
Due to the three disadvantages of information isolated island, business structure has been popularized in China. The following are three disadvantages:
So how to solve the problem of information island?
Before building a series of systems separately, it is most basic to design business architecture and define a unified blueprint. The data, data sharing, process opening and service arrangement of a map are all carried out 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 respectively?
The big V part is the life cycle of the whole scheme. In the demand stage of big V, it is necessary to study and define cross-departmental and cross-organizational business requirements, which are often cross-system. For example, the customer service function obviously needs the cooperation of call center system, CRM system and work order system, and supports a series of operations such as customer service answering the phone, confirming customer information, recording service content, and sending maintenance engineers to the door.
The small V part is the life cycle of a system. In the demand stage of small V, it is necessary to analyze and define the requirements of this system, which are often within the system. For example, CRM system is responsible for customer data management.
To sum up, the two life cycles of the scheme layer and the subsystem layer exist at the same time. For a typical example, what will a company do if it wants to build an ERP system?
Because the scheme involves a wide range and many departments, it is necessary to design the business structure. At this point, the business architect will design the business architecture and submit the business architecture book.
Assumptions mainly involve the requirements, development and testing of system A.
At this time, the demand analyst rushed to be responsible for the specification of system A. Of course, the demand analyst should refer to the overall agreement in the upstream business framework book.
Note: This is only an assumption, 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 realize a certain business function, which does not mean that all functions of Phase I project must belong to the same system.
Assumptions mainly involve the requirements, development and testing of system B.
At this time, the demand analyst rushed to be responsible for the specification of system B. Of course, the demand analyst should refer to the overall agreement in the upstream business framework.
If the business architecture wants to succeed, the first thing to do is for the architect to do the right thing, that is, to have enough experience in the actual work content of the business architecture, so don't miss it.
On the contrary, the lack of business architect's analysis link means the lack of business architecture blueprint planning items, which affects all the subsequent work from investment role to scheme design to implementation planning, and then to the identification of IT work packages and non-IT work packages.
Business structure = business function+organization structure+business process+business data
What are the actual work contents of the business architecture?
The predecessor of business architecture is BSP and other cross-system planning methods published by 1982 IBM. Therefore, business architecture is essentially cross-system planning.
However, the content of business architecture goes far beyond the scope of cross-system requirements analysis and covers a wider range of cross-system business architecture blueprint planning. The reason is that business architecture must play a bridge role in the transition from strategy to implementation-Shangjie company strategy, followed by IT implementation and non-IT implementation.
Yes, the business architecture also covers the blueprint of non-IT parts!
Let's take a look at the detailed working model of business architecture.
Generally speaking, business functions define what enterprises do, organizational structure defines who will do it, business processes define how to do it, and business data provides necessary support. Therefore, business functions, organizational structure, business processes and business data constitute the core of the business architecture blueprint.
At the same time, the business model reveals the essential relationship among enterprise products, enterprise core resources, customers, partners, channels, costs and profits. Business model is a modern tool and an essential planning project in the blueprint of business architecture.
On a small scale, 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 combing the organizational structure, business architects should combine the channel strategy and partner strategy, and make clear the business channel planning and partner planning, which is the "first-class citizen" of the business structure blueprint.
Second, where is the value chain? The value chain model is an overall description of all the production and business activities of an enterprise, and it is an essential project when planning the blueprint of business structure. Business functions can be divided into three levels and decomposed step by step:
Iii. business process = "main process+branch process+business rules";
For example, when buying a train ticket, the process of "voting-grabbing-paying" is stable. 、
For example, the branch process of seat selection, window, non-window, ticket and sleeper (bunk bed).
For example, buying children's tickets, adult tickets and student tickets must enter a branch process.
Therefore, it is recommended to define business processes and corresponding business rules.
To sum up, the content of the business architecture blueprint should be clear! Comprehensive! Intuitive! Detailed!
Above, we have learned the content of business architecture, which may not be intuitive enough. We use cases to deepen our understanding of each module.
Give examples to illustrate the five elements of the business architecture blueprint.
With the help of the five elements of business architecture blueprint, we can have a glimpse of the business architecture of China Railway 12306 platform.
Target business functions-online ticket purchase, online payment, online refund, etc.
Target organizational structure-building a new IT operation and maintenance center on the basis of the original organizational structure;
Target business process-log in first, then grab the ticket, then pay, and release the ticket source if it is overdue;
Target business model-online ticket purchase, saving trouble and effort (this is only a value proposition);
Target business data-user accounts, train schedules, seat data, orders, payment records, etc.
Examples include 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, in which the core business layer belongs to the top decomposition of business functions and services in the value chain.
When planning, we often use gap analysis to 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 should at least answer the following questions:
Question 1: What exactly does the business architect want to analyze? What is a strategic drive?
-Can it be specific to the policy document? Strategic policy? Market research? Friends, businessmen, benchmarks?
Question 2: What is the logic between strategy and blueprint?
-Can it be broken down into small targets? Small strategy formulation?
Question 3: What should we do first?
-Even a small invoicing system needs business research first, doesn't it?
Landing design steps
Let's take a look at the three-step strategy-driven business architecture (BA) design shared by the author.
The three steps in the picture are very clear and very close to reality.
Advantages: 1: A clear strategic driving starting point. In this method, three types of strategic drivers (Drvier) are defined, because in fact, one of national policies, enterprise strategies and benchmarking friends triggers the subsequent investigation, planning and implementation.
Advantage 2: The research link is clear. The first step includes research links.
Advantage 3: Emphasize the logic of transition from strategy to blueprint. The second step is to plan the business architecture objectives/strategies in a down-to-earth manner to ensure that the blueprint fully supports the strategies. This step belongs to the high-level business architecture design.
Advantage 4: Pay equal attention to target blueprint and gap analysis. In the third big step.
The design steps of BA target blueprint belong to the design of the underlying business architecture, in which the Gap link is a necessary link. We must identify the increment of business architecture and give corresponding implementation measures.
The value of gap analysis is that it is necessary for continuous architecture governance. Besides BA planning, it is also applied in AA, DA and TA design.
Get to the point, driver, do your research.
The first thing that business architecture design must do well is to make clear what the strategic drivers are.
The second thing that must be done well in business architecture design is research. Through investigation, we can understand the macro-environment and industry trends of enterprises in a broad sense, the cause and effect of strategy in a deep level, and the competitive pattern and friendly business trends of enterprises in a horizontal direction.
At first glance, the scope of the investigation is very wide and confusing. Look carefully, there are rules. The main three lines are management interviews, the ins and outs of strategy, and cases that can be used for reference.
Internal logic of key points from strategy to blueprint
The internal logic from strategy to blueprint, the skeleton supported by four concepts:
Drivers-strategic drivers
Goals-business architecture goals
Strategy-business architecture strategy
Blueprint-Business Architecture Blueprint
This is a large enterprise. How to construct the logic from strategy to blueprint to promote the transformation of digital procurement is believed to help us understand the following points.
To sum up, the internal logical thread from strategy to blueprint is: determining driving factors-goal decomposition-strategic design-blueprint definition. The logic is clear and the innovation is well founded.
Only when the business architect truly understands the strategic intention and accurately understands the strategic motivation can the subsequent business architecture design work be traced and the workload is not terrible.
Tool gap analysis
Go forward to determine the driving factors
This project is assumed to be a railway digital service transformation project.
Business architect (Zhang San) knows that the driver of business architecture is the starting point of the whole business and must be identified and thoroughly understood.
Zhang San learned that the driving force of the digital transformation project is the Enterprise Strategic Plan just formulated by the company.
The background of digital service transformation is expounded in Enterprise Strategic Planning: In recent years, the development of Internet technology has improved the service level of all walks of life, greatly facilitating people's basic necessities of life, medical treatment, study and play. From the perspective of enterprises, with the help of Internet, big data and other technologies, actively promoting digital transformation and embracing the customer-centered service model can improve customer satisfaction and enterprise competitiveness.
The core expression of the company's strategic planning and digital transformation strategy is to establish a people-oriented and customer-oriented service concept, innovate service methods, improve service standards, promote digital service transformation and improve service level.
Promote management interviews and do research.
Management interview: not to let business architects know about the industry, but to understand the concerns and main viewpoints of management.
Through interviews, business architects should understand:
Reference cases to promote research.
It is also necessary to study the best practices and cases that can be used for reference.
The reason is that the best practices and cases in each stage of the industry reflect the practical level of the industry at that time. Therefore, if business architects collect and divide the best practice cases in the current industry, they can better grasp the design direction and formulate design standards in their own architectural design.
The objectives and strategies of business architecture include the following two aspects:
Advanced gap analysis
Baseline business architecture
Target business architecture
In the above case, we determined the business capability gap and IT capability shortcomings through gap analysis, and then determined the business architecture goals and strategies, which is a bottom-up approach. To prepare for our follow-up links, for example, we have identified the core businesses that need to be strengthened, including sales, passenger transport, freight transport, liquidation and after-sales, and added value-added services, and given corresponding strategies in formulating business functions, business processes, business data, organizational structure and business model modules.
For example, from the value chain analysis in the above figure, we can see that our new business needs are value-added services, which can be realized through e-commerce business and travel agencies. If you think deeply, you will know that our goal is to increase income, and then you can think from top to bottom. In addition to e-commerce business and travel agencies, we can also be insurance agents to reach users through service portals.
Promote the determination of goals and strategies
Only by planning the business architecture objectives and strategies in a down-to-earth manner can we ensure that the subsequent business architecture blueprint definition fully supports the strategies.
Determining business objectives and strategies is an advanced part of business architecture design. The subsequent definition of business architecture blueprint is the bottom part of business architecture design. The former leads the development direction of the latter. This shows the importance of "determining the objectives and strategies of business architecture".
There are three ways to do this.
1) Top-down: decompose the drivers into sub-goals and map the sub-goals to business architecture strategies.
2) Bottom-up: Through gap analysis, we can find the shortcomings of capabilities and determine business architecture goals and strategies.
3) The combination of the above two practices, loop unrolling, verifies each other.
The digital transformation of railway system and the improvement of service level are the driving forces. 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 describe department setting, post setting, post responsibilities, etc. Partners and improvement mainly describe strengthening the relationship with upstream and downstream partners in the supply chain. Business channel innovation is also a common strategy in business architecture design, which will be illustrated with examples below.
The following organization chart draws the current organization structure and the target organization structure with the method of gap analysis, and shows the change points.
Novice business architects often think that there is nothing to design in the organizational structure. In fact, on the contrary, once the organizational structure needs to be changed, it will inevitably have a great impact.
As can be seen from the above figure, enterprises used to do IT development by themselves, but now the company intends to do IT operation and maintenance at the same time. Accordingly, an IT operation and maintenance center has been added to the enterprise organizational structure.
Business architects should identify possible changes in the organizational structure as soon as possible. Because whether IT is a new department, department enhancement or personnel capacity enhancement, it belongs to the capacity increment in TOGAF and needs subsequent non-IT work packages to achieve it.
Not only that, the change of organizational structure also affects the governance structure of the whole enterprise, from operation and management to restriction and supervision, and then to performance appraisal.
In short, although business architects are often degraded as cross-system software requirements analysts, business architects who really undertake the task of planning business architecture blueprints must be able to afford many "non-IT" plans.
Channel: The explanation in Baidu Encyclopedia is "the way to achieve a certain purpose", and the commercial channel is the way for users to achieve commercial purposes. As shown below, the train conductor helps the user to complete the ticket replacement through the channel of the ticket replacement terminal, and the passenger transport company informs the passengers of the train number information through the big screen.
Examples of business channel innovation
The website, mobile APP, ticketing terminal and big screen realize the online and offline linkage of ticket purchase, ticketing and train information viewing, which improves the user experience and internal efficiency of the company.
Feelings: As can be seen from the above figure, the business channel is not a completely isolated business architecture blueprint planning item. It echoes the business process, business function and organizational structure. Therefore, we should also consider these when planning business channels.
Regarding channel linkage, some peers summed it up like this:
An enterprise consists of a series of activities and functions that create value for customers. Our business functions come from activities and functions that can create value for our customers.
The value chain of an enterprise shows the relationship between a series 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:
Core business (creating key customer value)
Support activities (providing support services for core business)
Continuing to look at the case of digital service of transportation enterprises, business architects face the task of digital service transformation of transportation enterprises, and after painstaking research, give the value chain division structure below.
Some students may wonder why there are two different business types: passenger transport and freight transport in the core business module. In practical work, it may only be responsible for a module of passenger transport and freight transport. As mentioned in the background of our business architecture, the domestic business architecture is developed to solve the information island. Business architects are planning globally, rather than combing individual systems.
We have combed the above value chain, and now we have to break down the functional domain. The following figure is an exploded view of the first-level functional domain.
Next, by analyzing the business capability gap, we can see that four first-level functional domains and 13 enhanced first-level functional domains have been added.
Through the transformation from value chain analysis to first-level functional domain division, we will have the following gains:
First of all, the value chain analysis model laid the foundation for the subsequent functional domain division. Management support+core business, a business function, is really useful. And it is widely recognized by the industry, and it is naturally easy to be accepted by others in the process of communication.
2. Timeline thinking such as "before boarding, during boarding and after getting off the bus" is an essential analytical skill for business architects, and it is also an analytical habit often used by experts in Party A's enterprise field.
Business architecture design should not only define the target architecture, but also use the gap analysis method to determine the architecture capabilities that need to be enhanced to prepare for the subsequent implementation. Including business function change and increment, organizational structure change and increment, business process change and increment, business data change and increment.
The business model reveals the essential relationship among enterprise products, enterprise core resources, customers, partners, channels, costs and profits. Simply put, it is why some enterprises can do the same thing and some enterprises can't.
When doing business model, it doesn't mean that there is only one business model in the world. We can make a business model according to our own goals. For example, in the above case, the railway transportation company has three goals: convenience, income increase and efficiency increase. We can design three business models.
As far as the digital service transformation of railway enterprises is concerned, in order to facilitate the people, we should support access to enterprise services at any time through the network, telephone and mobile App.
As far as the digital service transformation of railway enterprises is concerned, in order to increase efficiency, hardware equipment and intelligent control system can be used to promote the digital transformation of cancellation, ticket checking and other links to improve efficiency.
With the help of nine small squares, it is a great invention to understand the commercial canvas and build an introductory and efficient system thinking environment.
As can be seen from the above example, this business model has the following advantages:
Personally, the business model combines the contents of BRD and MRD:
BRD: Business requirement document, which mainly focuses on who (customer segmentation), what problems to solve (value proposition), what needs to be done (key activities), what resources to spend (key resources) and how cost-effective it is (cost/income).
MRD: Market demand document, focusing on how consumers reach (channel access) and how to get partners.
Business process view is the input of application architecture, and it is also the longest chapter in business architecture.
This paper discusses the collaboration method of business processes, and thinks that simple business processes can be drawn by flow charts, and it is strongly recommended to use text descriptions for multi-branch and complex business processes.
Business process definition specification
The key point is the process decomposition of "1 trunk +N branch"
Focus on "stage+step" and attach the business or data model rules of each step.
The key point is to "indicate the bifurcation position of the main process" and attach the business or data model rules of each step.
This section is optional.
This part is very important. As mentioned earlier, the business process view is the input of the application architecture, so summarize this part again.
We found that there is a perfect correspondence between branch processes and business scenarios. Identifying branch processes is scenario-based thinking. On the contrary, if the main process and the branch process are not distinguished, the subsequent changes in business requirements will spread to a large area, rather than simply changing a branch process. This is so unprofessional.
There are many business functions and business scenarios. What does a business process define? A business process defines a business function, which includes multiple business scenarios. For example, ticket purchase includes multi-person ticket purchase and child ticket purchase.
There are many business rules, how to avoid the 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 diagram: The more core a business process is, the more branches and business rules there are. At this time, it is suggested to adopt literal norms, so that the information presented is more comprehensive. For uncomplicated business processes, the method of flow chart can be used.
This paper gives an overview of enterprise architecture, introduces the background and practical strategies of business architecture in detail, and deepens our understanding of business architecture through practical cases.
Let's review the relationship between the concepts involved in the article.
The essence of strategy-driven business design practice steps is that the span from strategy to business architecture blueprint is too big, and the logical chain can't keep up, so it is divided into two steps.
If you feel that you can improve yourself through the enterprise structure after reading it, which is conducive to the development of the company, then take action!