Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?
2 min answer -
advanced
A company operates marketplaces, payments, logistics and cloud services as one ecosystem. What does business architecture contribute that technical architecture does not?
2 min answer -
advanced
Since 2023 Oracle has sold Java SE through a single Universal Subscription priced per employee rather than per processor or per named user. A 12,000-employee group has Oracle JDK builds on 40 servers and roughly 900 laptops and plans to cut that footprint. What changed about their options, and where would copying the obvious response be a mistake?
3 min answer -
advanced
Southwest cancelled about 16,700 flights in December 2022 when crew scheduling could not recover from a storm, after years of deferred modernisation. How do you make that argument before the failure rather than after?
3 min answer
6 terms in this topic
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform
Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a produ…
conceptBusiness Capability
What a business does, expressed stably and independently of how it currently does it or who is responsible.
conceptRegulatory Constraint
A legal requirement that removes design options — and one that must be established early, because it is not negotiable and is expensive to retrofit.
case-studySpotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective
The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution abo…
conceptTwo-Pizza Team
Amazon's heuristic that a team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas, and — the substantive part — should own its service end to end.
conceptValue Stream
The end-to-end sequence of activities that delivers a result to a customer, viewed across whatever departments and systems it happens to cross.
Neighbouring topics
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.