What is a business solution architecture?
Brian E. Willemsen
ComEd, Unicom Corporate Offices, 9th Floor
227 West Monroe St, Chicago, IL 60606
Rodney K. Dell
Convergent Group, 6399 South Fiddler's Green Circle
Suite 600, Englewood, CO 80111
Introduction
The creation of a strategically aligned business transformation program is difficult
in the complex business and technology environment of today's utilities. This
activity needs to have a sound and clear methodology that successfully steers an
organization through the many confusing and conflicting forces.
Development of an end-to-end business solution mandates utilization of
methodology that does not focus on departmental solutions or system (product)
implementation. It needs to have a user-centric focus on implementing a
manageable number of complementary technologies that support appropriate
segments of the various key end-to-end business processes. These key
business processes need to focus on adding value to the customers and
incorporate an eBusiness strategy to expose required processes and information
to customers and business partners. This information needs to come from the
effective planned operational systems.
The development of a BSA provides the vehicle to coordinate and direct the
many program role players and activities. The BSA defines the process, data,
and system business owners so that stakeholder management and buy-in is
managed throughout the project lifecycle. It is valuable for expectation setting at
all levels of the organization and needs to be developed, refined, and approved
by the various program role players and by executive management. The BSA
provides consistent and mandated direction and scope for the business
transformation program.
A key BSA function is the determination of the appropriate business releases
along the time line to move the company to the agreed vision. The BSA is
developed and iteratively refined, as the business releases move through their
detailed design phase of development to fine-tune the program direction and
ensure that learning from each release is captured for future releases.
Business Transformation Methodology
A business transformation program needs to have a methodology that enables a
business to conceptualize the important perspectives and understand their
interdependencies.
The recommended business transformation process used to develop the BSA is
depicted in Figure 1 below. Figure 1 shows that the business process objectives
and architecture, enabled by available IS/IT technologies, precede the selection
of specific systems and the subsequent business release detailed design. The
first step is to define the high-level business process framework, independent of
the specific technology systems to be implemented, from which the high-level
business requirements and integration requirements can be identified, to enable
the strategic objectives to be achieved. These should then be used with the
overall system architecture direction in the system selection process.
Figure 1: Business Solution Architecture Approach
The program needs to develop a conceptual design and document this in a BSA.
Some of the major components of a BSA are defined below:
- Strategic and energetic business leadership with clearly articulated mission, vision, and values
- Executive management commitment in word and action to the business imperative and objectives for the radical business transformation change program
- The organization's change management principles
- Realistic business case cost and benefit tracking metrics
- Appropriate strategic and tactical management metrics to document effective management of the business processes, system usage, data maintenance quality, and achievement of the objectives
- An appropriate set of time-phased integrated business releases
- A conceptual design of vision Business Process Architecture and the enabling System Architecture indicating the scope of the various business releases
- Appropriate mapping of process to system and associated data ownership and the resulting functionality gap requirements and integration requirements
- Appropriate executive accountability for the processes, systems, data and performance metrics
- The agreed business rules and program decisions to identify and resolve issues
- Clear accountability for developing the requirements and population specifications for the various data sets required to effectively support the future business processes
Given the new competitive business environment for utilities, radical changes are
required in addition to the ability to replicate streamlined business processes
within new utility acquisitions. The extent of this standardization will be
dependent on the strategy to standardize supporting systems.
