Business architecture: a suitable basis for planning and designing a business process outsourcing initiative

Business architecture, one of the components of enterprise architecture frameworks, is an underutilised but potentially powerful and useful notion for Information Systems (IS) business analysts and solution architects. The development of a future-oriented or target state business architecture representing an achievable operational framework for a business and comprising a set of business processes designed for high-performance can provide an effective basis for addressing and solving an organisation's strategic issues and problems. This paper explores the concept of business architecture and demonstrates its usefulness by showing how it was utilised in planning, designing and communicating a business transformation based on business process outsourcing.