About the Business Architecture Meta model
The following visualization shows the core of the meta model for business architecture modeling: the most important entity classes and their relationships.
Business Architecture Meta Model recognizes business concepts and business elements.
The following visualization shows the common business concepts for business architecture modeling.
Business Architecture Meta Model Concepts.
The following visualization shows the common type of business elements for business architecture modeling.
Business Architecture Meta Model Elements.
The next visualization shows a detailed version of the complete metamodel with common high-level concepts and elements.
Business Architecture Meta Model Detailed.
Modeling Business Architecture
Modeling business architecture means creating models for the entity classes shown here in the above meta model.
The models that are often created first, when modeling business architecture, are:
- business context model
- business structure model (a.k.a business model)
- business architecture model (the total business conceptsmodel)
- for every concept in the architecture model a business concept model (the total business conceptsmodel) - first do this for the top 10 business concepts
- for every concept a business concept principle model
The models below are submodels of the business (structure) model:
- business actors model
- business functions model
- business processes model
- business value propositions model
- business products model
- business services model
- business goods model
- business events model
- business organization model
- business partnerships model
- business activities model
- business resources model
- business customer relationships model
- business (distribution) channels model
- business market segments model
- business locations model
- business costs model
- business revenue model
- business growth model
The models below are submodels of the business architecture model:
- business stakeholders model
- business needs model
- business requirements model
- business capabilities model (resembles the business concepts/architecture model)
- business rules model
- business norms model
- business standards model
- business legislation model
- business policies model
- business governance model
None of these models are mandatory of course. You may decide for yourself what models to create modeling your business architecture.
Business Actor
The business actor is a type of role played by an entity that interacts with a business system.
A business actor can interact with a whole business system or part of that business system and is external to the business system or part it interacts with. A business actor specifies a role played by a user, like a person, an animal, a robot, a software application, an organization or any other system.
A business actor may be assigned to one or more persons, organizations, applications, and other systems or entities (parts of systems). It can then make use of a system. A business actor can be aggregated in a location. The name of a business actor should preferably be a noun. Business actors preferably are named generically but can be named specifically. Examples are: Customer, Client, Worker, Supplier, User, Owner, Manager', Webshop, Candy Store, CRM, and System.
A shield would be a more appropriate shape for an actor, but as UML is widespread and most people are accustomed to this wireframe picture of a person, Dragon1 also conforms to this shape.
Business Actor Example.
Business Concept
A business concept is a business-related approach or way of working, abstracted from its implementation.
A business concept is like an archetype or base solution.
A business concept can be related to the requirements and needs of stakeholders and a business concept can be made part of business architecture. A business concept itself consists of business elements at the logical level and business components at the physical level. A business concept has one or more business principles. The business principle describing the whole of the concept is the first principle.
The name of a business concept preferably should be one, two, or three words and address a technology or approach: adjective, verb plus noun. Examples are Zero Waste, Self Service, eProcurement, and Smart City.
The shape is an ellipse that should indicate it can yet take any form.
Business Concept Example.