General abilities of the BIAN Architecture

The BIAN Architecture offers a Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive (MECE) collection of elemental building blocks for a bank’s functionality. It does the same for a bank’s information and for the services it exchanged within a bank and between a bank and its partners and stakeholders.

These unique characteristics provide the BIAN architecture with a series of abilities that can be applied in different architecture and management contexts. In this blog, we shall elaborate on the “general abilities”. In the next blogs, we will illustrate how these abilities can support different management disciplines and different architecture viewpoints.

Use BIAN as your common language and common Frame of Reference

BIAN’s clearly defined, MECE collection of building blocks provides a common Frame of Reference, within the bank and between the bank and its partners. This can be used on different ambition levels.

BIANs naming conventions and definitions can simply be used as common language between speech communities. It can be used to explore the existing landscape, by overlaying business organizations, processes and applications on the” BIAN-based Frame of Reference”, thus identifying the provided functionality. The functionality of target solutions can be expressed in BIAN building blocks. This provides powerful support for evaluating, comparing and optimizing business and application landscapes, and for clarifying the links between these landscapes.

The BIAN building blocks can be used as anchor points for documentation of a whole range of features, such as requirements and performance information. Documentation can be “labeled” with the BIAN building blocks it treats. Repositories can be “indexed” with them, facilitating their exploitation.

Finally, the principles and building blocks of the BIAN Architecture can be used in a “conceptual reference architecture”, steering new developments and the optimization of the business and application landscape.

Tailor your BIAN-based Frame of reference

The BIAN Architecture can be used as such, or tailored to the bank’s specificities and needs. All types of tailoring are possible, as long as the principles and patterns that underpin the BIAN Architecture are respected.

Introduce BIAN gradually

BIAN’s Architecture can be introduced gradually, “in time and space”. The ambition level on which it is used can be enhanced gradually. It can be introduced area by area, as its MECE nature supports the zooming” approach required for a successful enterprise architecture.