The term, Business Architecture, is used to refer to a process, model or profession. In these usages, "Business Architecture" refers to the organizing framework of a business, the documents and diagrams that describe that structure or the people who help build such a structure, respectively.
Definition:
"A blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands.”
Views:
The key views of the enterprise within the business architecture are:
1) the Business Strategy view
2) the Business Capabilities view
3) the Business Process view
4) the Business Knowledge view
5) the Organizational view
The Business Strategy view captures the tactical and strategic goals that drive an organization forward. The goals are decomposed into various tactical approaches for achieving these goals and for providing traceability through the organization. These tactical and strategic goals are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing evaluation of how successfully the organization is achieving its goals.
The Business Capabilities view describes the primary business functions of an enterprise and the pieces of the organization that perform those functions. This view further distinguishes between customer-facing functions, supplier-related functions, business execution, and business management functions.
The Business Process view defines the set of strategic, core and support processes that transcend functional and organizational boundaries. It sets the context of the enterprise by identifying and describing external entities such as customers, suppliers, and external systems that interact with the business. The processes also describe which people, resources and controls are involved in the process. The lowest process level describes the manual and automated tasks that make up workflow.
The Business Knowledge view establishes the shared semantics (e.g., customer, order, and supplier) within an organization and relationships between those semantics (e.g., customer name, order date, supplier name). These semantics form the vocabulary that the organization relies upon to communicate and structure the understanding of the areas they operate within.
The Organizational view captures the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_architecture