Last week I had a course on Business Architecture and it was fascinating.

As IT Architect, it's quiet easy to jump from IT Architecture to Business Architecture. The Service Oriented Entreprise (SOE) concepts are very close to the SOA concepts, except that instead of organizing systems and functions, it's about organizing businesses (services, products, people, processes and technology). The methodology proposed by Niels Klinkenberg results in Business Architectures which look like those of IBM's Component Business Modeling (CBM).

During the course, I liked how the Growth Phases Model of Larry Greiner was used to explain that the agile business architectures of tomorrow are a network of highly entrepreneurial Business Units (called Domains) which are specialized, higly efficient (benchmarked), have to obey the corporate "Playing Rules" and have to add value to the company. This makes of Governance (Corporate, IT, HR, Financial...) a central success factor. How to govern a large company that needs to be agile ? To answer this question, you'd better first have a good idea of its Business Architecture...