Business architecture in my opinion is an emerging practice and developing practice. The landscape of IT has become more complicated with the advent of cloud computing. Cloud computing offers pre-packaged “services” to easily take advantage of compute in the cloud. These services are technical implementations, but what is not well understood is the business logic that rides on top of these technical services. The business doesn’t change although the technical backbone might. Just for this very reason we find a deepening need for Business Architecture. Additionally, the business need to understand vendor lockin as well as what core systems that need to be targeted for these services.
There is also a trend on the horizon by federating IT into the business. This will cause a push for staff to understand not only the business but the technical landscape. In the aforementioned paradigm shifts, the need for strategic guidance will become paramount and driver for Business Architecture delivers the need to make sense out of the chaos and align strategic business initiatives to the changing and complex landscape of IT.
