Business Service Architecture: Shaping The Services Within Your Business Model

Business capability maps are an excellent conceptual tool for planning and assessment. But your business runs on the physical implementation of people, process, information, and technology, and while business changes ripple across all four of these factors, business capability maps do not address these operational changes. Forrester defines a business service as the combination of people, process, information, and technology that enables a business capability. With this construct, the business model as described by a business capability map connects to lower-level IT services, application services, technical services, and external services. Business service architecture is the set of practices enterprise architecture (EA) programs use to guide the definition, management, and optimization of the portfolio of services on which the business runs. This report describes the key concepts of business service architecture and how using business service architecture to inform EA planning helps firms manage all types of changes — from the smallest to the largest.