What is Business Architect and how do you Define Business Architect?
The Business Architecture Guild
and several related professional bodies and industry standards provides a definition of business architect as:
“One who applies business architecture to solve business problems and deliver business value.”
A business architect collaborates with other disciplines such as strategy development, business analysis, process management, operations, and systems analysis.
A business architect helps to provide the business architecture that binds various aspects of an enterprise strategy, design and modelling.
Table of Contents
What is the Role of a Business Architect?
What is the role of a business architect? A business architect requires a view of the entire organisation. In general, they may report directly to a member of the senior leadership team. A business architects requires a broad understanding of the organisation, including its:
- Environment and industry trends,
- Structure and reporting relationships,
- Value streams,
- Capabilities,
- Processes,
- Information and data stores, and how all these elements align to support the strategy of the organisation.
Business architects play an important role in communicating and innovating for the strategy of the organisation. They utilise blueprints, models, and insights provided by business architecture to continually advocate for the strategy of the organisation and address individual stakeholder needs within the scope of the organisation’s business goals.
A business architect:
- Develops a business architecture strategy.
- Applies a structured business architecture approach and methodology.
- Captures the tactical and strategic enterprise goals.
- Describes the primary business functions of the enterprise.
- Defines the set of strategic, core and support processes.
- Defines the data shared across the enterprise.
- Captures the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units.
- Make recommendations to improve the business.
- Provide information to the business in a way that it results into concrete actions.
- Looks after organisational blueprints.
- Communicates effectively with organisational stakeholders.
- Measures performance and change initiatives.
- Critiques strategies and initiatives.
Why is Business Architect Needed?
Why is business architect needed? A business architect is needed to
- Understand the entire enterprise context and provide balanced insight into all the elements and their relationship across the enterprise, and
- Provide a holistic, understandable view of all the specialties within the organisation.
- Understand, assimilate, and align a wide variety of specialties that of strategic concern to the organisation.
- To provide insight, skills, and knowledge from business strategy and goals, conceptual business information, enterprise IT architecture, process architecture, and business performance and intelligence architecture.
What Skills does a Business Architect Need?
A business architect is required to have the following underlying skills and competencies:
- A high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty,
- The ability to put things into a broader context,
- The ability to suppress unnecessary detail to provide higher level views,
- The ability to think in long time frames over multiple years,
- The ability to deliver tactical outcomes (short term),
- Provide immediate value and contribute to achieving the business strategy (long term),
- The ability to interact with people at the executive level,
- The ability to consider multiple scenarios or outcomes,
- The ability to lead and direct change in organisations, and
- A great deal of political acumen.
How do you Become a Business Architect?
How do you become a business architect? To become a business architect you can gain a business architecture qualification from the Business Architecture Guild who provide a body of knowledge to business architects for the creation and application of business architecture across various scenarios as well as the deployment and governance of the practices.
The body of knowledge also provides insights into how to use business architecture to achieve business goals through an overall framework that integrates with business process, case management, business analysis, and information technology disciplines. The body of knowledge also provides a useful framework for organising the business architecture.
What is the best business architecture certification? The Business Architecture Guild is the best business architecture certification for business architects and aspiring business architects.
Business Architect vs Business Analyst
So what is the difference between a business architect vs business analyst? A business architects main focus is at the organisational level and understanding the capabilities, market, products, and how value is delivered to customers. The business architect does not focus on delivery, but the information that they develop can lead to projects and ensuring alignment with organisational capabilities.
They’re all about planning and generally not at all about delivery and execution. That’s where the business analyst comes in.You can think of a business architect as a scaled up version of a business analyst:
- Business architect: Understands and creates maps and models to represent the organisation’s capabilities, delivery of value, products and services, etc.
- Business analyst: Understands value of their project/initiative and focuses on business needs and solution delivery. Ensures alignment of their projects and requirements to business strategy and business architecture.
Can a Business Analyst Become an Architect?
Can a business analyst become a business architect? The answer is yes. There is no fixed path to becoming a business architect – some senior business analysts with the right aptitude and attitude transition into the role of a business architect due to the demands of the organisation and need to take a strategic direction.
