Business architecture: a holistic approach to defining the organization necessary to deliver a strategy

An approach is presented that examines an organization from a holistic perspective of customer-value and the necessary work activity, competences, roles and business rules required to fulfil it. Emphasis is placed on determining and selecting those areas where performance improvement can be justified through an understanding of potential benefits for both customer and organization. A graphical model, the blueprint, is built up by adding successive layers to form a composite view of the architecture of the future business. The authors describe the key building blocks in formulating the blueprint and amplify the business architecture approach with reference to case study exemplars. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.