Using TOGAF to create a business architecture

All organisations have architectures, either formal, or informal in the heads of the leaders. Informal communication, and alignment of your strategy and capability becomes difficult as organisations grow. A business architecture can help.

For medium or large organisations creating a formal enterprise architecture including business, data, application and technology architecture is a significant task often taking between 6 and 18 months. To allow alignment with a roadmap for the future  it’s a good idea to focus on the business architecture first. It dosen’t have to be perfect 80/20 is always a good point to start  communicating the architecture around the business for feedback and start to align.

A business architecture can commonly contain functional, process, product and information architectures and occasionally financial and marketing/brand architectures which will be explored later.

TOGAF is a widely recognised framework for enterprise architecture describing a language and methodology that can be used as a powerful tool for enabling the creation of effective enterprise architectures. TOGAF follows an IT orientated approach and its less developed areas include the creation of business architecture and its alignment with IT architecture (functional, application, data, technology and platform).

The framework recognises the need for, and indeed encourages customization of it’s concepts and methods. In order to use the framework within the context of the entire enterprise TOGAF’s context needs to be widened to include the whole business, it’s people and processes.

Many of the methods, structures, and approaches TOGAF describes are patterns that can also be adapted to be used to create business architectures which allow alignment with IT architectures.

The standard architecture design method ADM can be used for creating business architecture by taking the core concepts and modifying the context and focus from IT to business architecture.

Note: The following article assumes the reader has a good understanding of TOGAF9 and that the scope of the agreed architecture work is to create the enterprise business architecture.

Next: Creating business architecture using TOGAF.

Like TOGAF This section of the TOTEM IT site is a work in progress, any thoughts, ideas, or assistance with its content are much appreciated.