While Business Process Management (BPM) is being considered an element of business architecture, in reality, little attention was given to developing and managing an end-to-end business architecture. Organizations rather focused on BPM as if it were an isolated discipline. However, there are many profound reasons that lead to the neglect of business architecture, most notably the lack of business architecture standards and software to support business architecture development and architecture lifecycle management.

Slightly varying a Gartner statement, business architecture provides the discipline and process to translate business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. While Gartner originally refers to enterprise architecture, the statement also holds true for business architecture, since business architecture is a part of an enterprise architecture.

Business Process Management (BPM), in turn, is an element of business architecture, along with organizational structures, information assets, roles, business semantics, etc. From a business viewpoint, business architecture encompasses all elements that are needed to implement an organization's business model and strategies.

As software is becoming available that lets business professionals in the role of business architects perform business architecture development and lifecycle management, BPM can be truly embedded in an end-to-end business architecture, as it should have been from the beginning.