Enterprise Architecture: Business Domain Design, Multi-Layer Architecture & Governance

Enterprise Architecture Overview

Enterprise architecture serves as a bridge between organizational strategy and IT, using structured methods to define business, data, application, and technology architectures, ensuring enterprise goals align with resources. A typical framework is the "four horizontal, five vertical" model: four horizontals — strategy layer (global planning), management layer (business-IT collaboration), design layer (solution design), implementation layer (concrete delivery); five verticals — business architecture, application architecture, data architecture, technology architecture, and architecture governance — forming a V-model that refines top-down and enforces bottom-up compliance.

Business Domain Design

Business domains represent divisions of the enterprise core business value chain, often corresponding to organizational departments such as planning management, financial management, and marketing management. Design follows five principles:

Strategy-driven: Business domains must support enterprise strategic goals, ensuring alignment with strategic direction.

Reflect business essence: Comprehensively cover business, clearly express business logic, avoid omissions.

Enable capability improvement: Support unified management and gap analysis of business capabilities, promoting business improvement.

Promote integration and efficiency: Break down departmental silos, support end-to-end process collaboration, improve overall efficiency.

Stability and continuous improvement: Planning is forward-looking, with regular review and optimization.

Typical Design Methods

Business Architecture Design

Business architecture design uses value stream analysis to identify enterprise-level and professional-level value streams, clarifying the value creation process. Based on value streams, business objects are designed, data standards defined, achieving process-data integration. A business capability framework is built, cataloging business capabilities to support componentization and servitization of business capabilities.

Data Architecture Design

Data architecture design defines data domains and data subjects, establishing conceptual, logical, and physical data models. It clarifies data distribution and flow rules, ensuring single-source-of-truth sharing and cross-system information consistency.

Application Architecture Design

Application architecture design maps application domains from business domains, plans application modules and functions, and defines application interaction relationships. It adopts layered decoupling and service-oriented architecture to enable flexible composition and rapid response of applications.

Technology Architecture Design

Technology architecture design defines technology domains and technology capabilities, selecting appropriate technology platforms and components. It plans system deployment architecture to ensure system reliability, scalability, and security.

Architecture Governance

Architecture governance is key to ensuring enterprise architecture implementation, comprising:

Architecture principles and standards: Formulate architecture design principles, standards, and specifications to guide architecture design.

Architecture review and compliance checks: Conduct regular reviews of architecture designs to ensure adherence to architecture standards.

Architecture asset operations: Manage architecture assets such as architecture blueprints, reference architectures, and design templates to support continuous architecture optimization.

Enterprise architecture and business domain design is a continuous iterative process that must combine enterprise strategy, business requirements, and external environmental changes to continuously optimize and adjust architecture, supporting sustainable enterprise development.

The article includes numerous architectural diagrams illustrating the frameworks and models described above.