What is Business Architecture and why is the use of a BPM tool important?


Business Architecture is the blueprint of the organization. That blueprint shows eventually different parts of the organization and the interactions among them to illustrate how value is delivered to the customer and revenue is generated. Let’s say your company engineers, manufactures, markets and service engineering components such as bearing, control systems, lubrication, seals and more, across a wide variety of industries. Each of which have different needs and requirements. In this case there are 2 primary ways to think of your organisation; The first is from a customer perspective and the second is from an executive’s perspective.

First, let’s look at it from a customer’s perspective; When a customer places an order for, let’s say, a bearing, multiple parts of the business do work in response to that order. Excess channels are activated, activated processes are initiated, people respond, applications are invoked, data is accessed and products are affected. To visualize this you could represent all parts of the business in a view and identify the parts to come into play to meet the customer’s order request. In this view, if you were to optimize the order processing, you can then look at all these parts and how they play together to increase the operational effectiveness. Let’s call this the business operating model.

Second, let’s look at it from a executive perspective; All the parts that we’ve just talked about can be grouped logically to define different capabilities that the company has. Each of these can further be decomposed into lower-level capabilities. Each capability is like a container in which you can put different things such as access channels, processes, people, applications, data and more. Essentially, in order to achieve a specific capability, you need a combination of different things. In this view you can prioritize the work required to enhance the capabilities that are in turn required to deliver on the strategic objectives of the company. Let’s call this the business capability model.

When you have to keep an eye on all these processes one by one, it will eventually take a lot of time, communication and ultimately money that you will miss. It is therefore advisable to use a BPM software, which keeps an eye on all this values ​​within the business process management. It keeps your vision into the organization more clear and ensures a better performance within all these processes and eventually the whole business model.