OMG Business Architecture Special Interest Group

Last updated

The Business Architecture Special Interest Group (BASIG) is a working group on business architecture of the Object Management Group (OMG), known for their contribution to the history of business architecture. This working group was founded in 2007 as the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG).

Business architecture

Business architecture is a discipline that "represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end‐to‐end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders.

Object Management Group technology standards consortium

The Object Management Group (OMG) is a computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a range of technologies.

The history of business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. In the next decades business architecture has developed into a discipline of "cross-organizational design of the business as a whole" closely related to enterprise architecture. The concept of business architecture has been proposed as a blueprint of the enterprise, as business strategy, and also as the representation of business design.

Contents

History

Foundation

The 2007 announcement for the OMG Technical Meeting on Dec. 12, 2007 in Burlingame, California gave the following rationale for the foundation of a specialized working group on business architecture:

In looking at the link between IT and the business, it has become apparent that there needs to be more formally defined sets of relationships between IT architecture and business architecture. In addition, the concept of business architecture is probably 10-15 years behind the maturity of the IT architecture world. For example, the relationship between business rules and processes is not apparent and the role of organizational governance is similarly disconnected.

Therefore, we are initiating the business architecture working group (BAWG). Business architecture was recently defined as - "Formal models and diagrammatic representations of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise." This can certainly be debated, but there is no argument to the fact that there is a need for formalization of business architecture to align business to business and business to IT... [1]

Maglio (2010) summarized, that "in 2007, the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG) was founded as part of the Object Management Group (OMG). The BAWG aims at establishing industry standards, supporting the creation, and alignment of business blueprints." [2]

Definition of Business Architecture

As already quoted the 2007 announcement, the working group proposed the following working definition of Business Architecture:

Formal models and diagrammatic representations of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise. [1]

The initial definition developed into the following well known 2008 definition:

A blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands [3]

The definition was first published on the working groups homepage bawg.omg.org, and first cited in Solaimani et al. (2010) [4] In the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG) wiki (2010) there was a further discussion on the definition, which was presented as:

A formal blueprint of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise. [5]

Different views of an organization

In order to develop an integrated view of an enterprise, many different views of an organization are typically developed. Each "view" is typically a diagram that illustrates a way of understanding the enterprise by highlighting specific information about it. The key views of the enterprise that may be provided by business architecture address several aspects of the enterprise; they are summarized by the Object Management Group (2012) [6] as follows:

View model

A view model or viewpoints framework in systems engineering, software engineering, and enterprise engineering is a framework which defines a coherent set of views to be used in the construction of a system architecture, software architecture, or enterprise architecture. A view is a representation of a whole system from the perspective of a related set of concerns.

  • The Business Strategy view captures the tactical and strategic goals that drive an organization forward...
  • The Business Capabilities view describes the primary business functions of an enterprise and the pieces of the organization that perform those functions...
  • The Value stream view defines the set the end-to-end set of activities that deliver value to external and internal stakeholders...
  • The Business Knowledge view establishes the shared semantics (e.g., customer, order, and supplier) within an organization and relationships between those semantics (e.g., customer name, order date, supplier name)...
  • The Organizational view captures the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units. [6]

In addition to the above views of the enterprise, the relationships connect the aforementioned views form the foundation of the business architecture implementation. This foundation provides the framework that supports the achievement of key goals; planning and execution of various business scenarios; and delivery of bottom line business value. [6]

Organization

Meetings

BAWG Technical Meetings:

Chairs

Participants, a selection

Geoff Balmes

Geoff Balmes (born c. 1958) is an American Business Architect. He obtained his BA in Computer Science at the University of Georgia in 1981. He has worked his way up in industry from Systems Consultant, Systems Analyst and Process Architect to Business Architect. Described himself as "Change Management Specialist and Senior Business Architect skilled at structuring the business and aligning IT and business strategies." [7] He published one article: Balmes, Geoffrey. "A Collaborative Framework for Business Architecture." Cutter IT Journal 21.3 (2008): 21.

Fred A. Cummins

Fred Cummins (born c. 1958) is an American Business systems architect, and Co-Chair of the Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force since 1999. He obtained BSEE from Kettering University, and his JD in law from Wayne State University Law School. He wrote the books "Developing Business Systems with CORBA" (1999), "Enterprise Integration: An Architecture for Enterprise Application and Systems Integration" (2003), and "Building the Agile Enterprise" (2009), and several articles, and holds a series of patents [8] Co-develops the Value Delivery Modeling Language (VDML).[ citation needed ]

Neal McWhorter

Neal McWhorter (born c. 1962) is an American Strategic Business Technology Consultant. He obtained his BA in economics from The University of Chicago in 1984, and in 1986-87 studied for his M.A. in Education Administration at Harvard University. He started his career as analyst in equity investment (1984–91), was manager at Price Waterhouse (1991–94), and Consultant at Lockheed Martin Information Technology (1997– 98). He chairs the Business Architecture SIG since 2010, and co-founded the Business Architecture Guild in 2010 and is board member ever since. He authored several papers and co-authored with William M. Ulrich the 2011 book "Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation" (VIAF)

Jim Rhyne

Jim Rhyne (born c. 1950) is an American Business/IT Architecture Consultant. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976, while working as assistant Professor at the University of Houston. He made his career as Distinguished Engineer at IBM from 1977 to 2009. He was IBM Representative at the Object Management Group from 1989 to 1995, jointed the OMG Business Architecture Working Group in 2009, and is one of the main contributors to the Business Architecture Guild since 2010. [9] He authored much of the BASIG wiki in 2009-10. [10]

William M. Ulrich

William M. Ulrich (born c. 1956) is an American business architecture consultant, consultant at Cutter Consortium, director and lecturer, known for development of 'The Systems Redevelopment Methodology' (TSRM) in the 1990s,[1][2] on legacy systems in the 2000s[3] and more recently on his work on business architecture.

Publications

Related Research Articles

Information and technology (IT) governance is a subset discipline of corporate governance, focused on information and technology (IT) and its performance and risk management. The interest in IT governance is due to the ongoing need within organizations to focus value creation efforts on an organization's strategic objectives and to better manage the performance of those responsible for creating this value in the best interest of all stakeholders. It has evolved from The Principles of Scientific Management, Total Quality Management and ISO 9001 Quality management system.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is "a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a comprehensive approach at all times, for the successful development and execution of strategy. Enterprise architecture applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. These practices utilize the various aspects of an enterprise to identify, motivate, and achieve these changes."

Technology strategy is the overall plan which consists of objectives, principles and tactics relating to use of technologies within a particular organization. Such strategies primarily focus on the technologies themselves and in some cases the people who directly manage those technologies. The strategy can be implied from the organization's behaviors towards technology decisions, and may be written down in a document. The strategy includes the formal vision that guide the acquisition, allocation, and management of IT resources so it can help fulfill the organizational objectives.

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software development methodology that focuses on creating and exploiting domain models, which are conceptual models of all the topics related to a specific problem. Hence, it highlights and aims at abstract representations of the knowledge and activities that govern a particular application domain, rather than the computing concepts.

John A. Zachman is an American business and IT consultant, early pioneer of enterprise architecture, Chief Executive Officer of Zachman International, and originator of the Zachman Framework.

The Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) is a standard definition of concepts used to express business process models, adopted by the OMG. Metamodels define concepts, relationships, and semantics for exchange of user models between different modeling tools. The exchange format is defined by XSD and XMI, a specification for transformation of OMG metamodels to XML. Pursuant to the OMG's policies, the metamodel is the result of an open process involving submissions by member organizations, following a Request for Proposal (RFP) issued in 2003. BPDM was adopted in initial form in July 2007, and finalized in July 2008.

Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) is a publicly available specification from the Object Management Group (OMG). KDM is a common intermediate representation for existing software systems and their operating environments, that defines common metadata required for deep semantic integration of Application Lifecycle Management tools. KDM was designed as the OMG's foundation for software modernization, IT portfolio management and software assurance. KDM uses OMG's Meta-Object Facility to define an XMI interchange format between tools that work with existing software as well as an abstract interface (API) for the next-generation assurance and modernization tools. KDM standardizes existing approaches to knowledge discovery in software engineering artifacts, also known as software mining.

The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a business. SBVR is intended to formalize complex compliance rules, such as operational rules for an enterprise, security policy, standard compliance, or regulatory compliance rules. Such formal vocabularies and rules can be interpreted and used by computer systems. SBVR is an integral part of the OMG's model-driven architecture (MDA).

Solution architecture is a practice of defining and describing an architecture of a system delivered in context of a specific solution and as such it may encompass description of an entire system or only its specific parts. Definition of a solution architecture is typically led by a solution architect.

Steven Howard Spewak was an American management consultant, author, and lecturer on enterprise architectures, known for the development of Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP).

Business Motivation Model

The Business Motivation Model (BMM) in enterprise architecture provides a scheme and structure for developing, communicating, and managing business plans in an organized manner. Specifically, the Business Motivation Model does all of the following:

This article documents the effort of the Health Level Seven(HL7) community and specifically the HL7 Architecture Board (ArB) to develop an interoperability framework that would support services, messages, and Clinical Document Architecture(CDA) ISO 10871.

Jaap Schekkerman is a Dutch computer scientist and founder of the Institute For Enterprise Architecture Developments (IFEAD) in the Netherlands. He is particularly known for his 2003 book How to Survive in the Jungle of Enterprise Architecture in which he compared 14 Enterprise Architecture Frameworks.

Henderik Alex (Erik) Proper is a Dutch computer scientist, Professor of Information Systems at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and IT consultant, known for work on conceptual modelling of information systems and enterprise engineering.

Enterprise Architect (software) visual modeling and design tool based on the OMG UML

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is a visual modeling and design tool based on the OMG UML. The platform supports: the design and construction of software systems; modeling business processes; and modeling industry based domains. It is used by businesses and organizations to not only model the architecture of their systems, but to process the implementation of these models across the full application development life-cycle.

William M. Ulrich is an American business architecture consultant, consultant at Cutter Consortium, director and lecturer, known for development of 'The Systems Redevelopment Methodology' (TSRM) in the 1990s, on legacy systems in the 2000s and more recently on his work on business architecture.

A data architect is a practitioner of data architecture, an information technology discipline concerned with designing, creating, deploying and managing an organization's data architecture. Data architects define how the data will be stored, consumed, integrated and managed by different data entities and IT systems, as well as any applications using or processing that data in some way. It is closely allied with business architecture and is considered to be one of the four domains of enterprise architecture.

References

  1. 1 2 OMG Business Architecture Working Group. "Notes on BAWG Technical Meeting: December 10-14, 2007 - Burlingame, CA." at omg.org/docs/bmi/07-12-09, now web.archive.org.
  2. Paul P. Maglio, Cheryl A. Kieliszewski, James C. Spohrer (2010) Handbook of Service Science. p. 259
  3. OMG Business Architecture Working Group. "Business Architecture Working Group," at bawg.omg.org, Oct 10, 2008. (archive.org, Oct. 10, 2008).
  4. Solaimani, Sam, Harry Bouwman, and Mark de Reuver. "Smart home: aligning business models and providers processes; a case survey." (2010).
  5. What is Business Architecture? (Draft) Last modified: 2010/09/21 10:40 by jimrhyne
  6. 1 2 3 OMG Business Architecture Working Group, "Business architecture overview," at bawg.omg.org. Accessed December 18, 2014
  7. Geoffrey Balmes; Business Architect in Benefit Operations at UnitedHealth Group. at linkedin.com. Accessed 15.03.2015
  8. "Fred Cummins, Business systems architect," at linkedin.com. Accessed 16-03-2015.
  9. Business Architecture Guild: Our team. Accessed 23-03-2015.
  10. BASIG Wiki, Last modified: 2010/09/21 10:40 by jimrhyne.