The Business Architecture Toolkit attached is a template for documenting the Business Architecture of a change initiative.
A Business Architecture is defined before a change is detailed to describe the desired target state of the business which is subject to change.
According to TOGAF, the Business Architecture “describes the product and/or service strategy, and the organizational, functional, process, information, and geographic aspects of the business environment”.[1]
This template serves two purposes as well as two audiences:
- Business Architecture elaboration – The first purpose is to help ESS projects elaborate their Business Architecture (BA). Audience are thus ESS project managers and project staff. The template suggests a Table-of-Content for the Business Architecture document and indicates best practice elements for reuse.
- Business Architecture review – The second purpose is to support a systematic, structured review of an ESS project’s BA. Audience are thus EA experts in charge of such reviews. The template comprises the key criteria against which the assessment should be made as well as the required evaluation grids.
The template describes what should be elements in a business architecture and provides a structure for documenting it. For each element, the template provides:
- a description of what the item should cover including its indicative length
- reusable elements
- key quality criteria.
The template supports a review of the Business Architecture and thus supports the calculation of an overall score reflecting the global quality and completeness of the Business Architecture.
The template builds on TOGAF, a worldwide recognized Enterprise Architecture Development Method, as well as the ESS Enterprise Architecture Reference Framework (ESS EARF) and ESS Statistical Production Architecture (ESS SPRA).