Business & Technology Strategy and Architecture

Business Strategy is how the bank will allocate and prioritize spend in investment and BAU/expense to achieve growth / positioning goals. Examples: Business strategy may be even more macro e.g.:

Business Architecture is a model, typically expressed as a set of states, events, and transitions, that describes how products/entities and business events work together to satisfy appropriate business functions. This applies both to "mainline" functions like capital markets activities and "support" functions like talent management, change management, and quality metrics/continuous improvement. A good business architecture will have:

There are a number of frameworks that purport to model and communicate Business Architecture, including Zachman and xBML, and a number of bespoke tools (e.g. ProVision) that can model business process and interaction. It is important to note, however, that these are only frameworks for organizing and communicating information. They add no specific value in terms of actually defining a real working business architecture to (for example) do follow-the-sun portfolio trading and regional close.

Technology Strategy could be considered a component of overall Business Strategy. Key elements of a technology strategy include:

Technology Architecture is the physical realization of the business architecture. A good technical architecture will feature:

Similar to business architecture, there are number of frameworks available to organize/manage and communicate technology architecture such as ITIL.

Note that Information Architecture is a bridge between business architecture and technology architecture and a critical element in its own right. Information Architecture describes things like keys and key granularity, CRUD profile of data, domains and mappings. It also deals with vital implementation details like assumptions for audit timestamps (e.g. GMT to seconds [since sync to the millisecond is not realistic across all participants]), language encodings, and rich structures (e.g. Money = {Currency+Amount})


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