I am often asked to describe the role of the Business Architect; the role is new enough that most Resource Managers do not have a job description on file. Of course, the answer depends on the context within which the question is asked. Sometime I describe what the Business Architect “does.” Other times I describe what the Business Architect “accomplishes.” Yet other times the inquirer really wants to know what “skills” the Business Architect should possess.
When asked recently, I decided to take a shot at creating a job description. There is no new information or creativity included in the description. In fact, most of it is borrowed from three resources available on the internet:
- The overview of Business Architecture found on the OMG Business Architecture Working Group’s web site.
- An article I authored earlier this year for the Business Architecture Institute entitled The Transition to Business Architect
- An article by Bill Ulrich entitled The Business Architect Must See the Forest for the Trees
Following is that job description.
Role
The Business Architect plays a key role in structuring the enterprise in terms of its governance structure, business processes, and business information. This person aligns strategic goals and objectives with decisions regarding products and services; partners and suppliers; organization; capabilities; and key business and IT initiatives. The primary focus is the business motivations, business operations and business analysis frameworks and related networks that link these aspects of the enterprise together. The Business Architect works to develop an integrated view of the enterprise using a repeatable approach, cohesive framework, and available industry standard techniques.
Organization
The Business Architect reports into business management and works closely with a counterpart in IT to align technical solutions with business needs. The Business Architect may have supervisory responsibility, possibly acting as coach and mentor to junior members of the Business Architecture Center of Excellence. In addition, the Business Architect works though others at every level of the organization soliciting strategic imperatives from senior leaders and executives, and supporting business unit managers as they leverage business architecture artifacts to create their business plans. Finally, the Business Architect may provide direct input into the governance cycle that supports the achievement of key goals, planning and execution of various business scenarios, and delivery of bottom line business value.
Responsibilities
- Develop a business architecture strategy based on a situational awareness of various business scenarios and motivations.
- Apply a structured business architecture approach and methodology for capturing the key views of the enterprise.
- Capture the tactical and strategic enterprise goals that provide traceability through the organization and are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing governance.
- Describe the primary business functions of the enterprise and distinguish between customer-facing, supplier-related, business execution and business management functions.
- Define the set of strategic, core and support processes that transcend functional and organizational boundaries; identify and describe external entities such as customers, suppliers, and external systems that interact with the business; and describe which people, resources and controls are involved in the processes.
- Define the data shared across the enterprise and the relationships between those data.
- Capture the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units.
Skills and Qualifications
- A broad, enterprise-wide view of the business and varying degrees of appreciation for strategy, processes and capabilities, enabling technologies, and governance
- The ability to recognize structural issues within the organization, functional interdependencies and cross-silo redundancies
- The ability to apply architectural principles to business solutions
- The ability to assimilate and correlate disconnected documentation and drawings, and articulate their collective relevance to the organization and to high-priority business issues
- Experience using model-based representations that can be adjusted as required to collect, aggregate or disaggregate complex and conflicting information about the business
- The ability to visualize and create high-level models that can be used in future analysis to extend and mature the business architecture
- Extensive experience planning and deploying both business and IT initiatives
- Experience modeling business processes using a variety of tools and techniques
- Exceptional communication skills and the ability to communicate appropriately at all levels of the organization; this includes written and verbal communications as well as visualizations
- The ability to act as liaison conveying information needs of the business to IT and data constraints to the business; applies equal conveyance regarding business strategy and IT strategy, business processes and work flow automation, business initiatives and IT initiatives, and benefit realization and service delivery
- Team player able to work effectively at all levels of an organization with the ability to influence others to move toward consensus
- Strong situational analysis and decision making abilities
Conclusion
There you have it – my attempt at a job description for the Business Architect. Please feel free to use it as a starting point; I encourage you to work with your Resource Manager and adapt it to fit your organization. As always, comments are welcome.
