Business architecture helps portfolio managers prioritize IT-based projects by mapping projects to a business capability model.  A capability model can aggregate what’s important, urgent, and doable in an organization which can then be used to prioritize projects.  Project portfolio managers may use several approaches to portfolio analysis (see Schuurman & Powell, 2008) but a capability-based portfolio analysis adds additional rigor and discipline to prioritization.

A less known but highly essential artifact of business architecture is the business use case model.

A business use case (hereafter referred to as BUC) model is the higher abstraction of the system use case model (or simply, the UC model). In a BUC, business actors with specific business goals interact with other business actors. The BUC is primarily an external view of the business model or area of interest. A system use case diagram, on the other hand, illustrates the domain from an internal point of view. 

Business architecture is about enhancing accountability. A business architect’s job can be compared to what an accountant does for an organization. A management accountant tracks an organization’s performance against a set budget and gleans insights in the process. The accountant shares these insights for management to take action. In the same way, a business architect highlights the traceability of business and IT initiatives against a set of performance targets. The organization’s strategic goals define these success metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs).