Business

Business is the first segment of the BPT loop. It is where the organisation declares intent — what it needs, what it sells, and what capabilities it must develop or sustain.

Business does not implement. It declares. Everything the Business segment produces is an input to Product.

What happens in Business

The ICL ADM wheel operates in the EA governance layer — above BPT, not inside any segment. It is the project container. It spans the full Taxonomy and produces artifacts at every level. Business, Product, and Technology consume those artifacts according to their jurisdiction.

Business Artifacts

Business Artifacts are the Conceptual-level outputs of the ICL ADM wheel — the artifacts that belong to the Business segment’s jurisdiction. They declare intent; they are not designs or implementations.

Principles — the constraints and non-negotiables that govern the engagement
Architecture Vision — business case, scope, stakeholder sign-off
Business Architecture — capability map, product declarations, information assets

See ICL Project Deliverables for the full deliverable list.

Business Artifacts are placed in the Business repository — the persistent store of Conceptual-level ICL ADM deliverables for this segment. Product segment monitors the Business segment repository and picks up what arrives there.

This is architectural decoupling, not organisational ignorance.

Business roles are of course aware of Product and Technology — organisations are not compartments. What the repository enforces is that the formal architectural handoff goes through a governed, persistent, auditable mechanism rather than through informal channels, meetings, or direct requests. The repository is the boundary that EA governs; what happens between people is outside its scope.

The conceptual boundary

Business owns the what and the why. It does not touch the how. Technology and implementation concerns that surface during Business architecture work are not resolved in the Business Architecture step — they are logged as requirements and passed to the ADM’s central Requirements Management entity. Every subsequent ADM step begins by re-checking requirements left there by previous steps. The wheel resolves them at the appropriate step and Taxonomy Category; the Business layer does not.

ADM, Repositories, and Activity Streams

The Business segment always contains at least one wheel. In larger organisations or complex engagements it contains many — each scoped to a domain or capability cluster, all governed by EA. See One wheel or many for the full treatment.

ADM and BPT are decoupled by the three ADM Deliverables Repositories. Each repository is passive — it stores ADM deliverables and decouples the wheel from the segments. The BPT loop is driven by the four Activity Streams, which are the conceptual signaling mechanism between B, P, and T.

A wheel that produces a purely Conceptual outcome — strategy, compliance assessment, capability map — places its deliverable in the Business repository. When a wheel deliverable declares a product, it lands in the Product repository. Product repository deliverables in turn feed the Technology repository.

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