The
goal of business process engineering (BPE) is to define architectures that will
enable a business to use information effectively.
When taking a world view of a company‘s
information technology needs, there is little doubt that system engineering is
required. Not only is the specification of the appropriate computing
architecture required, but the software architecture that populates the ―unique
configuration of heterogeneous computing resources‖ must be developed.
Business process engineering is one approach
for creating an overall plan for implementing the computing architecture .
Three different architectures must be analyzed
and designed within the context of business objectives and goals:
• data architecture
• applications architecture
• technology infrastructure
The data architecture provides
a framework for the information needs of a business or business function. The
individual building blocks of the architecture are the data objects that are
used by the business. A data object contains a set of attributes that define
some aspect, quality, characteristic, or descriptor of the data that are being
described.
The application architecture encompasses
those elements of a system that transform objects within the data architecture
for some business purpose. In the context of this book, we consider the
application architecture to be the system of programs (software) that performs
this transformation. However, in a broader context, the application
architecture might incorporate the role of people (who are information
transformers and users) and business procedures that have not been automated.
