Comparing Two Leading Business Architecture Methodologies and Frameworks: The Business Architecture Guild® and BACOE™
Bernard Baillargeon’s comparative review of The Open Group’s TOGAF® and the Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE™) applied eight rigorous criteria to expose the structural and philosophical differences between a theory-driven, exam-based approach and a practitioner-based one. His conclusions were clear: TOGAF is IT-focused; EACOE is business-focused. TOGAF produces practitioners who can pass a multiple-choice test; EACOE produces practitioners who can actually do the work.
The same discipline of analysis deserves to be applied to Business Architecture, and specifically, to the two most prominent organizations that claim to define and certify its practice: the Business Architecture Guild® and the Business Architecture Center of Excellence (BACOE™).
This article applies Baillargeon’s eight criteria directly to these two organizations. The goal is not advocacy for its own sake, but clarity, the same clarity that every executive, practitioner, and organization deserves before investing time, money, and organizational credibility into a Business Architecture program.
