History of business architecture

The business architecture body of knowledge has been developed and is updated multiple times each year, and the interest from the academic world and from top management is growing.

"[1] John Zachman (2012) commented in this context, that "a lot of material has been written about business architecture (by some definition), going back to The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) by Frederick Taylor.

"[11] The American organizational theorist William R. Synnott (1987) presented one of the first models of business architecture, (see image), in the context of data management.

Assembling the various information resource components' inventories results in an "as is" picture of the corporation's technology structure.

There are some basic elements in business architecture: management, organization, processes to be performed and data to be made available/delivered.

[13]These ideas around the concept of architectural planning evolved in the early 1990s into frameworks, such as TAFIM, the predecessor of TOGAF.

[15]In the original 1989 illustration of the NIST AE Framework (see image) the top layer was named "Business Unit Architecture."

Gharajedaghi (1999) explained the context: In a global market economy with ever-increasing levels of disturbance, a viable business can no longer be locked into a single form or function.

In this context, proper functioning of self-reference would certainly prevent the vacillations and the random search for new products/markets that have, over the past years, destroyed so many businesses.In fact, the ability to continuously match the portfolio of internal competencies with the portfolio of emerging market opportunities is the foundation of the emerging concept of new business architecture...[17]According to Bodine and Hilty (2009) "important advances in this area borrowed from the operations discipline came in 1993 in the form of Michael Hammer and James Champy‘s book Reengineering the Corporation, which introduced tools for mapping and optimizing business activities using process modeling.

The Balanced Scorecard developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton at about the same time enabled the business to measure overall corporate success against goals on qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions.

It identifies its purpose, vital functions, active elements, and critical processes and defines the nature of the interaction among them.

Business architecture consists of a set of distinct but interrelated platforms, creating a multidimensional modular system.

Each platform represents a dimension of the system, signifying a unique mode of behavior with a predefined set of performance criteria and measures.

[17]The IBM researcher Douglas W. McDavid presented the paper "A standard for business architecture description."

There is an excellent discussion on what constitutes business architecture and the nature and use of information categories, although concepts such as product and agreement seem to be missing.

[22] NOTE: This Framework draws heavily from BusinessGenetics Business Modelling Language (BML) According to Bodine and Hilty (2009) The arrival of Internet technologies like email, instant messaging and online data repositories in the mid-1990s opened up tremendous flexibilities in the ways co-workers could collaborate, while the new ability of buyers and sellers to interact in virtual space and transact online changed the traditional structure of businesses... By the late 1990s, MBAs with advanced skills in Internet technologies began developing live business models for e-commerce websites in real-time.

The model became the business, and thousands were launched, allowing companies to access vast volumes of data and respond rapidly to changing market conditions... A Google search on ―Business Architect‖ at the time returned just 12 results... A Google search on ―Business Architect‖ in 2009 returns over 1 million listings.

[1]According to Bodine and Hilty (2009) Important advances in this area borrowed from the operations discipline came in 1993 in the form of Michael Hammer and James Champy‘s book Reengineering the Corporation, which introduced tools for mapping and optimizing business activities using process modeling.

The Balanced Scorecard developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton at about the same time enabled the business to measure overall corporate success against goals on qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions.

According to Bernus & Noran (2010): Several proposals emerged in those two decades – e.g. PERA (Williams 1994), CIMOSA (CIMOSA Association 1996), ARIS (Scheer 1999), GRAI-GIM (Doumeingts, 1987), and the IFIP-IFAC Task Force, based on a thorough review of these as well as their proposed generalisation (Bernus and Nemes, 1994) developed GERAM (IFIP-IFAC Task Force, 1999) which then became the basis of ISO15704:2000 “Industrial automation systems – Requirements for enterprise-reference architectures and methodologies”...[7]The Business Architecture Special Interest Group (BASIG) is a working group on business architecture of the Object Management Group (OMG).

In 2008 Jeff Scott had commented in this matter: Interest in business architecture is growing dramatically.

A selection of related subfields:[citation needed] Guitarte (2013) stipulated, that also different types of organizations have been active, and created a so-called "business architecture vortex.” He listed four types: Guitarte commented, that "influencers led followed by communities of practice and standards-setting bodies; vendors followed.

Conflicting ideas provide opportunity to define the future of business architecture profession.