Lecture notes for Business Architects

In this reading, you will find the backbone of business architecture, the capability map, as it connects the business intent with the operating model. For this reason, it is a very powerful and useful tool to understand a business and support decision-making.

This is a new version of the second reading for business architects, and it addresses a topic that is fundamental to our work: the business model. Creating this model, or at least a part of it, is the first task of any architecture project, as it identifies and describes how a company creates and delivers value to its customers. To do this, we must determine who receives the value (actors), what that value is (business object), how the value is delivered (service portfolio), how the value is created and flows between different components (business structure), among other aspects.

A great deal of material has been written on the topic of strategy, presenting multiple approaches and methodological perspectives. In this reading, we will address the topic from a very structural point of view, not so much aimed at professionals in strategic planning, but especially at business architects. This means that we will focus primarily on learning how to determine whether a strategic model is structurally sound, well-formed, precise, and, above all, complete.

In this reading, we will start with an overview of the models, then quickly focus on business models. We will dedicate a significant amount of space to the conceptual models we find there, as they are of particular interest to business architects. This is because conceptualizing a domain (creating the conceptual model of a domain) is one of our key tools in our work.

In this reading, we will address the topic of business strategic analysis, a crucial stage in strategic planning. We will start with a global view of what a business analysis technique means and then explore fifteen of the most well-known techniques, from a very practical and consistent perspective.