Virtually every human discipline has evolved specific vocabularies and grammars for concisely and precisely communicating concepts among its practitioners: mathematics, music, accounting, electronics and, of course, the building trades are a few such examples. In fact, it is probable that these and other fields would not have been able to evolve to the level they have without linguistic specialization. The glaring exception to this list is a language designed expressly for communicating how an enterprise is organized and what it does. For this task, we are still largely dependent on standard natural languages and notional graphic symbols.

This situation often results in communication bottlenecks manifested by lengthy meetings, long email threads, convoluted documents and confusing graphics: In short, business inefficiency and a compromised ability in responding to change, a key metric for business success.

This presentation makes the case that technologies developed over the last 10 years by the aerospace and defense communities for expressing complex technical systems can be applied for representing enterprises and their business systems -- the business architecture.

The technologies discussed are freely available as open standards supported by a variety of tool vendors and an active community of practice assuring their continued development. Thus, the infrastructure for creating such business architectures exists today.

The presentation is in three parts starting with the business case. This is followed by a brief discussion of a pilot study done at NASA and concludes with a look at the actual case study model in the tool.