Business engineering is all about engineering the business architecture. There are multiple definitions of business architecture. We stick to the Business Architecture Working Group's (BAWG) definition, which fits into one sentence: business architecture is “a formal blueprint of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise.”

According to the BAWG, “business architecture articulates the structure of an enterprise in terms of its capabilities, governance structure, business processes, and business information. The business capability is “what” the organization does, the business processes, are “how” the organization executes its capabilities. In articulating the governance and information, the business architecture considers all external actors to an enterprise (including its customers, suppliers, and regulators), to ensure that flow in and out of the enterprise are captured.”

Viewed from a slightly different perspective, business architecture ties together a diverse business ecosystem that encompasses a wide variety of business entity types, such as business objective, business goal, business strategy, organization unit, business capability, value chain, business process, role, semantic, business policy, customer, supplier, service provider, and many more. These business entity types, along with the relationships among them, are the essence of the business architecture. Business entity types are models from which instances instances can be created. For example, there may be many instances of type “Role”, such as “Sales Clerk”, “Business Analyst”, “CEO”, etc.

Business architecture makes visualizing complex business ecosystems, represented as a multitude of business entities and relationships among them, a reality. Modern ICEE software provides the means to define views that suit the needs of the various persons and roles that are involved in the business architecture life-cycle. Typical views would be a business strategy view, a business capabilities view, and an organizational view.

A modern ICEE would be expected to support the following major activities:

• Definition of the business architecture of a business ecosystem, including all required business entity types, business entities and relationships.

• Definition of the business engineering processes that are needed for business architecture life-cycle management.