An enterprise business architecture (EBA), as defined by the authors, “is a definition of what an enterprise must produce to satisfy its customers, compete in a market, deal with its suppliers, sustain operations, and care for its employees. It is composed of architectures, workflows, and events.” Linked to the corporate strategy, the EBA is the foundational architecture. It is the hierarchical parent of other enterprise architectures (business architecture, technology architecture, security architecture, and organizational architecture). The EBA is based on the value streams of an enterprise. Each value stream is defined by a collection of activities that create a result for a customer (internal or external). Events trigger actions or processes. Workflows portray how inputs are transformed to outputs. Architectures describe the structure of components.

The book presents reasoning as to why enterprise business architecture is the critical foundational architecture. The authors explain why all other architectures are derived from the EBA. The explanation is made more concrete by an example. The book has eight chapters and four appendices. The first two chapters explain the need for planning information systems architectures, and discuss the weaknesses in current methodologies. Chapters 3 and 4 explain some concepts underlying EBA modeling, and what it accomplishes. Chapters 5 and 6 present a simplified case study of an EBA, and its links to other architectures for data/information, applications, security, and organization. Chapters 7 and 8 are short chapters, explaining what to expect and problems to be managed. The appendices include a ten-page description of the modeling language used in the authors’ approach to EBI, an example of an EBA project schedule, a ten-page glossary of terms, and a pointer to a Web site. There is an index. The modeling conventions, terminology, graphical notations, and other features of the approach used by the authors are generally consistent with well-known conventions associated with information architectures and the planning of systems.

The book is essentially a high-level explanation of, and argument for, enterprise business architecture. The high-level explanation is made more concrete with a simplified example of an EBA, and its relationship to other architectures. The book explains the concept of, the elements of, the graphical modeling language employed for, and the terminology of an EBA (and the models derived from it). It is not a detailed manual for creating an enterprise business architecture.

The three strengths of the book are its high-level explanation of EBA, and how it fits into the planning and development process; the example (even though it is simplified); and the explanation support, in the form of a glossary. In other words, the book generally does what it says it will do. The weakness of the book, for someone who is interested in building an enterprise business model, is its lack of sufficient detail and explanation to support the work.