If you started reading the QualiWare’s first article in the series that presents relevant knowledge, timely actions and real results for your enterprise architecture program (from-strategy-to-execution-and-beyond—part-1), you learned that The Vision and Stategy Phase is the first phase.

This phase entails creating a relevant business outcome statement and a value proposition for enterprise architecture in your organization, to ensure the necessary executives’ buy-in for the enterprise architecture program. In the article is said that value preposition should include models that clearly illustrates the value of enterprise architecture as a strategic capability and, one model that could be used is Business Model Canvas.

But what is Business Model Canvas?

“Business Model Canvas is a strategic management and lean startup template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It is a visual chart with elements describing a firm’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances. It assists firms in aligning their activities by illustrating potential trade-offs.” (source: Wikipedia)

The idea is that – typically in an interactive-workshop environment – we explore the overall business-context, and place sticky-notes on the various building-block segments of the Canvas to build a model of how the business would work, iterating towards a viable and profitable business-model.
The model was initially proposed in 2005 by Alexander Osterwalder.

To know more, there’s a lot of material on the web. I suggest you:

– the book: “Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers” by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur: BusinessModelGeneration
– the talk by Alexander Osterwalder: Tools for Business Model Generation: talk
– a very interesting articles series about how to use Business Model Canvas beyond its initial intended context of commercial startups, so in in existing organizations, by Tom Graves: bmcanvas-beyond-startups-1/
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas