OMG Business Architecture Special Interest Group

The Business Architecture Special Interest Group (BASIG) is a working group on business architecture of the Object Management Group (OMG), known for their contribution to the history of business architecture. This working group was founded in 2007 as the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG).

The 2007 announcement for the OMG Technical Meeting on Dec. 12, 2007 in Burlingame, California gave the following rationale for the foundation of a specialized working group on business architecture:

In looking at the link between IT and the business, it has become apparent that there needs to be more formally defined sets of relationships between IT architecture and business architecture. In addition, the concept of business architecture is probably 10-15 years behind the maturity of the IT architecture world. For example, the relationship between business rules and processes is not apparent and the role of organizational governance is similarly disconnected.

Therefore, we are initiating the business architecture working group (BAWG). Business architecture was recently defined as - "Formal models and diagrammatic representations of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise." This can certainly be debated, but there is no argument to the fact that there is a need for formalization of business architecture to align business to business and business to IT...

Maglio (2010) summarized, that "in 2007, the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG) was founded as part of the Object Management Group (OMG). The BAWG aims at establishing industry standards, supporting the creation, and alignment of business blueprints."

As already quoted the 2007 announcement, the working group proposed the following working definition of Business Architecture:

Formal models and diagrammatic representations of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise.

The initial definition developed into the following well known 2008 definition:

A blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands

A formal blueprint of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise.

In order to develop an integrated view of an enterprise, many different views of an organization are typically developed. Each "view" is typically a diagram that illustrates a way of understanding the enterprise by highlighting specific information about it. The key views of the enterprise that may be provided by business architecture address several aspects of the enterprise; they are summarized by the Object Management Group (2012) as follows:

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