Excellent. You brought great significance to CAPABILITY and clarified the meanings of and relations between Enterprise, Architecture, Business, Lines of Business, Processes etc.

Is this your original definition or have you borrowed it from any other source?

Does this have anything to do with CMM? Can’t be. They can use your definition and simplify what they are doing.

Keep going…best wishes

putchavn@yahoo.com

Reading through the text that introduces this discussion, I already see various disciplines compared and mixed up from the perspective of the word requirement. You simply cannot do that as ‘requirement’ has different meanings in also different contexts. Let me try to explain . . .

The word requirement is frequently used by designers to address the characteristics or functionality of an IT artifact. This is not the requirement business people about and thus architects should talk about . . . unless, architects also do design activities. Although this is another discussion – am I architecting or designing – it fundamentally is part of the problem we face with requirements. I am an architect and my sole purpose is to solve a business problem and constrain realization projects such that they are an answer to the problem. Put differently, I have to find out what-must-be-satisfied to solve the business problem and translate that into constraints-for-the-characteristics of the IT artifact. If I would not bother to delineate clearly the meaning of the word ‘requirement,’ I equally could have written ‘I have to find out the business requirements and translate them into IT artifact requirements.’ See the difference? I emphasize with architectural requirements on what must be satisfied in order to . . . .

To clearly differentiate architecture from design, I always use the word ‘architectural’ as a preamble to things that relate to essentialities of the problem and solution. So I always speak of architectural requirements, not architecture requirements. So if I talk in business contexts, I speak of architectural business requirements. The latter automatically drives to talk about essentials to business folks ‘what needs to be satisfied to solve your business problem?’

Maybe I am shooting a bit from the hip, but there lies so much philosophy underneath my architectural thinking, which is difficult for me to put down here in a few words. But, my answer to the original question ‘Business Requirements – we all want them, but how do we get them?’ would be 1) stop comparing them with other disciplines, 2) articulate / define the business problem collaboratively (these are the problems not the requirements!) and 3) talk about what needs to be satisfied (not solved!)

Hope I added something to this discussion . . .

Peter