Business Architecture is Part of Enterprise Architecture - Philip Allega

A common misperception being hyped in EA circles concerns the notion
that business architecture is something different from enterprise
architecture. This is a blatant attempt to classify EA as something only
applicable to IT when, in fact, EA is applicable to the ENTERPRISE that
covers numerous viewpoints for stakeholders, including business, information, technology and solution architecture.


Where does this confusion come from?  To be blunt,
the number of practitioners who have only used EA for IT, focusing upon
the technology viewpoint of EA, have left a few large gaps in their
approach to developing their EA viewpoint.  These gaps include:

1. Developing a business contextthat guides the advice and deliverables within the technology architecture viewpoint, and all other viewpoints.
2. Consuming the resulting advice within, minimally, the IT  investment decision-making process.
3. Creating a governance and assurance mechanism that communicates the change that has occurred, or not occurred, in light of EA advice.

A common mistake we see is when well-meaning EA programs conflate the
business architecture viewpoint of EA with the business context of EA. 
The business context of EA is formed of:

1. A vision of the future state.  At Gartner, we call
   this the Common Requirements Vision.  This deliverable is typically
   10-12 pages and explicitly connects environmental trends, business
   strategies and requirements of business process and IT together in
   priority matrices.  This is a conceptual level document that requires
   confirmation of the target state, and its associated priorities, by the
   top of the governance decision-makers – typically, the people who decide
   how to allocate resources in the organization.
2. A root, anchor model. The highest visualization of
   the enterprise, recognizable to the business, may be in the form of a
   business operating model, a hyper-extended view of the business
   ecosystem, business capability maps, a federated model or some
   combination of these for particular stakeholders.  All business
   processes, information, applications, solutions, technologies, people
   skills, people, other entities, are overlaid upon and disaggregated from
   this root, anchor, model.
3. A set of guiding principles. These shape the
   investment and action behaviors of all those who seek to select, create,
   and implement anything within any EA viewpoint.

Business Architecture is Part of Enterprise Architecture - Philip Allega