A Comparative Review of Business Architecture

Business Architecture provides foundational and practical concepts for enterprises and their transformation. Business Architecture is an approach to represent the way an organization operates, instrument alignment between business performance targets and operational priorities, and capture resources needed (including IT solutions). These Business Architecture goals have received a great deal of attention from different disciplines in the last two decades. Recently, companies and industries in regimes of fast technological change and innovation have made Business Architecture gain new emphasis. As it is also seen from the literature, Business Architecture is being revisited intensively by companies, government, analysts, standards organizations, and researchers. As Business Architecture involves different concepts and it has a strong multidisciplinary nature, it is common to find a number of approaches to Business Architectures in the literature. Furthermore, the variety of Business Architecture perspectives is wide and their applications depend on purpose of adoption, scope of usage, and overall maturity of specific concepts. Thus, in order to unravel commonalities and differences among these approaches, it is important to establish a unified perspective for presenting and comparing them. Business Architecture comprises three core components or dimensions, namely, conceptual model, methodology and tooling. This report reviews ten approaches to Business Architecture from the literature and evaluates them according to proposed measures. Strengths and shortfalls may be identified across the above dimensions. A particular focus of the evaluation is laid on the service concept, which is often presented as the connection point between business and IT.