Vision-IT: Architect Business Solutions
Devising Effective and Efficient System and Process

Despite recent negative headline news reported in the media with regards to the inability of IT to deliver tangible business values, the OECD recognises that the use of information and communication technology represents a key platform for organisation in gaining competitive strength, increase in productivity, and ensuring their future prosperity.  This is because according to OECD productivity data study in 2003, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia received the largest boost from investment in ICT.

Today there is a greater reliance on the use of IT to realise many urgently required business strategy and innovations in management, business process, product, and service. The impact of IT solution has potential to transform the way organisations conduct their business and thus exert significant impact on business, process, organisation structure and people than merely as a technology service. The 'technology/productivity paradox' news rightly highlighted the fact that throwing large sum of money into IT expenditure and rushing after new technology do not magically translate into higher productivity. This is because unlike utility such as power and water, the adoption of technology in using IT solution to reap business benefits does not represent a simple process of 'turning on or off' the needed utility service.  In fact, it requires organisation to carefully plan and architect an appropriate business solution and IT capability that can deliver effective and efficient systems and process.

Vision-IT believes the 'architecture of business solutions' should represent a 'living blueprint' that strategically show how components of technology, process, people and organisation interact with each other in order to deliver the actual business solution capability needed. Unlike the traditional architecture blueprint of a building or engineering drawings, we argue that the architecture of a business solutions and its enterprise architecture model need to become a 'living blueprint'. This is because components within the architecture solutions should properly represent the real-life situation of a business and its IT environment as well as its evolution toward the targeted visionary goals. Today the technology and know-how is available to make this on-going 'living blueprint' of business architecture a reality. 

Currently there are numerous frameworks, models, process, patterns and tools available to create business model and architecture representations. These include the use of Zachman Information System Architecture (ISA) framework, The Open Group Architecture Framework, Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework, DoD Architecture Framework (C4ISR), and to a lesser extent architecture concepts and practices contained in methodology such as Rational Unified Process (RUP), Process MeNtOR and the Information Engineering Methodology.

Among all these the Zachman's work is widely recognised as a key enterprise architecture approach. The ISA framework approach has been derived from similar classification structures which are found within the older 'Architecture/Construction' and 'Engineering/Manufacturing' disciplines. The following table presents the view on the architectural representation produced over the process of building a complex engineering project, along with analogies in the building, airplane and information systems.

The ISA framework represents a logical structure for classifying descriptive representation of an 'enterprise model' and its associated planning, designing and implementation artefacts. It attempts to provide a view on the enterprise model along the perspective of its various stakeholders from the 'planner', 'owner', 'designer', 'builder' to 'artefacts'. 

The following diagram depicts Vision-IT "who, What, When, Where, Why and How" approach to business architecture framework using UML (Unified Modelling Language) representations.