---
title: "History of business architecture"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_business_architecture"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:15.010771+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

As activity : Lindsay & Price (1991) for example presented business architecture as a "self security activity," which included the "study of a function, including its component organizations, tools, methods, and relationships, both internal and external... The very activity of identifying and listing all these elements is an important learning process for managers. In addition to the element identification and listing processes, the architecture develops a set of principles. Principles are semi-permanent statements of philosophy. That is, they are the basic rules by which managers agree they want to operate."
As blueprint or model of the enterprise : Bourke (1994) described it as "a set of integrated blueprints of the ... [enterprise]'s business processes," and Veasey (1994) spoke of business architecture as "a model of the enterprise which is a mechanism for the management of change."
As strategy for any change program : Davis (1996) for example described that business architecture can be used to "describe the type of comprehensive plan required to set the stage for integrated change programmes. The term "architecture" connotes the level of creativity and holistic change required to achieve process excellence. A comprehensive business architecture defines the way in which human performance, processes and technology will be integrated to transform business performance and create value."
Business architectures is presented as tool for change management, acknowledged Van Rensburg (1997). It "provide organisations with the means to understand organisational activities in such a manner that it is used as a mechanism to support the organisation through the business transformation process. Using an object-oriented modelling approach in the design of the business architecture allows for a robust modelling approach which captures real world instances in a business architecture repository. This enables the creation and caption of organisational understanding required for the transformation process."

=== FEA and business subarchitecture ===
In 1996 the US government introduced the Clinger–Cohen Act, to improve the acquisition and management of their information resources.

=== Enterprise reference architecture ===
Beside the enterprise architecture frameworks a second type of architectural models were proposed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which were called Enterprise Reference Architecture. 

GRAI-GIM (Doumeingts, 1987)
PERA (Williams 1994)
CIMOSA (CIMOSA Association 1996),
Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (Scheer 1999), and
GERAM (IFIP-IFAC Task Force, 1999)

=== Foundation ===
In 1999 two works on business architecture and its foundation were published, which became two of the most cited works on business architecture. In his "Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity" Jamshid Gharajedaghi presented a set of principles to design business architecture, which were based on systems thinking. Gharajedaghi argued, that business Architecture should be considered a system:

Business Architecture is a general description of a system. It identifies its purpose, vital functions, active elements, and critical processes and defines the nature of the interaction among them. Business architecture consists of a set of distinct but interrelated platforms, creating a multidimensional modular system. Each platform represents a dimension of the system, signifying a unique mode of behavior with a predefined set of performance criteria and measures.
The IBM researcher Douglas W. McDavid presented the paper "A standard for business architecture description." According to Evernden & Evernden (2003) this paper described a "high-level semantic framework of standard business concepts – abstracted from experience, enterprise business models, the organization of business terminology and the various generic industry reference models. There is an excellent discussion on what constitutes business architecture and the nature and use of information categories, although concepts such as product and agreement seem to be missing." McDavid argued:

The concepts in the Business Architecture description provide a semantic framework for speaking about common business concerns... For our purposes, this semantic structure provides a common set of concept patterns to be able to understand the types of content that needs to be supported in technology-based information systems... a set of generic concepts and their interrelationships organize business information content in terms of requirements on the business, the boundary of the business, and the business as a system for delivery of value.

== 2000s ==

 NOTE: This Framework draws heavily from BusinessGenetics Business Modelling Language (BML)

=== Business architect ===
According to Bodine and Hilty (2009)

The arrival of Internet technologies like email, instant messaging and online data repositories in the mid-1990s opened up tremendous flexibilities in the ways co-workers could collaborate, while the new ability of buyers and sellers to interact in virtual space and transact online changed the traditional structure of businesses...
By the late 1990s, MBAs with advanced skills in Internet technologies began developing live business models for e-commerce websites in real-time. They used the development tools to both represent and build the business at the same time. The model became the business, and thousands were launched, allowing companies to access vast volumes of data and respond rapidly to changing market conditions... A Google search on ―Business Architect‖ at the time returned just 12 results... A Google search on ―Business Architect‖ in 2009 returns over 1 million listings.

This is just the beginning of a valuable and rapidly expanding profession. Today‘s Business Architects take a holistic view of the complete business representing all interests and engaging all expertise. They see the business organization as a constantly changing, dynamic organism that balances central planning with individual initiative to achieve its mission through the articulate implementation of its corporate strategy.

=== Tools and frameworks ===
According to Bodine and Hilty (2009)

Important advances in this area borrowed from the operations discipline came in 1993 in the form of Michael Hammer and James Champy‘s book Reengineering the Corporation, which introduced tools for mapping and optimizing business activities using process modeling. The Balanced Scorecard developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton at about the same time enabled the business to measure overall corporate success against goals on qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions.
According to Bernus & Noran (2010):