Introduction

In Concept: IT Architecture outlined the concept of viewpoints (views and aspects) that are used to describe the IT architecture of a "system". A Business Location is one of the aspects, or vertical slices through the architecture, that defines and models a view that is useful in understanding the enterprise and its operation. Note that location has a physical connotation, which is used in this view of the system, but it is abstracted to the three different levels in the IT architecture, namely business, logical and technology.

At the business level described here, the notion of location is used to identify and describe conceptual locations at which the system (or enterprise) has a presence. The Business Locations Model supports this viewpoint by describing what business activities are carried on at the defined enterprise locations, and organizes them into a simple model. See: Guideline: Business Locations Model.

Locations

A location represents the initial, abstract, somewhat physical partitioning and distribution of the system, and is concerned with the geographic placement of (conceptual level) resources (buildings, points-of-presence, and other notions) along with the business activities provided there. A locality expresses notionally where business process are supported, thus there is a strong connection between business location and business activity. 

The semantics of locality implies a tighter grouping of activities without defining exact geographic locations, or how the activity is to be supported. It is conceivable for very complex, very large systems, that there might be locations that decompose to finer-grained localities (just as a system might contain subsystems).

The description of a location includes a general indication of the conceptual type of location being defined (e.g. Headquarters, factory, point-of-presence, etc.) along with the business activities supported at the location.

Finally, the communications between locations is also defined ... in this case, at a business level, simple links with no technical details are defined with optional definition of processes that traverse these links.