As Enterprise Architecture continues to make great strides to refocus on people, processes, and value rather than primarily technology, the line between Enterprise Architect and Business Architect becomes increasingly unclear. In some organizations, Business Architects play very similar roles to Enterprise Architects, and in others, Business Architects maintain a distinctly separate strategic focus on the organization’s operations.
In this blog, we’ll delve into Business Architecture’s relationship with Enterprise Architecture and the role of Business Architects in the digital organizations of today.
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Occupying a senior role in the organization, the Business Architect is a strategic thinker who bridges the gap between business strategy and its operational execution. The Business Architect possesses a deep understanding of the organization's goals, capabilities, and processes, and is responsible for overseeing critical deliverables such as business capability models and value streams.
As strategic partners, Business Architects ensure the organization's capabilities align with its goals to achieve the intended business outcomes. They are also guardians of the Business Architecture, a comprehensive blueprint that outlines the organization's core functions, processes, and information flows. Business Architects lead in the development of new multi-dimensional Business Architecture or in re-architecting aspects of existing ones.
Business Architecture provides a holistic view of the organization, outlining the building blocks that enable it to deliver value. It considers not just the technological landscape but also the people, processes, and information that drive the organization forward.
There are some common misconceptions about Business Architects. They are not simply IT specialists or project managers. Business Architects have a broader focus, working across the organization to ensure business goals are met.
Among the common misconceptions about Business Architects, here are two key ones to dispel:
Finding ways to bridge the gap between strategy and execution is key to the role of Business Architect. Achieving this requires wearing many hats, but the core Business Architect responsibilities fall under strategy alignment, process optimization, and IT enablement.
Besides identifying capabilities and opportunities for improvement, Business Architects play a crucial role in collaborating with IT teams to ensure technology solutions support and enable those capabilities and opportunities. The key Business Architect roles and responsibilities include:
The deliverables produced by Business Architects are crucial for organizational decision-making. Some key deliverables include:
Business Capability Models: These models map the organization's core functions, outlining how they contribute to achieving strategic objectives. This shared understanding allows for informed decisions about resource allocation and capability development.
Gap Analysis Reports: Business Architects analyze the current state of operations against the desired future state. These reports highlight discrepancies, allowing for targeted interventions to bridge the gap. This could involve process improvements, technology investments, or organizational restructuring.
Value Stream Maps: Value streams are visual representations that depict the flow of activities required to deliver products or services to customers. Business architects can optimize value streams for better performance and cost reduction by identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Business Architecture Roadmaps: These roadmaps chart a course for implementing the desired future state. They prioritize initiatives, define timelines, and outline dependencies, ensuring a clear path toward achieving strategic goals.
Communication and Alignment Plans: Business Architects don't operate in silos. They actively communicate their findings and recommendations to stakeholders across the organization. Clear communication plans ensure buy-in from senior leadership and IT teams, fostering alignment for successful execution.
The benefits created by these deliverables for organizations include:
Strategic Decision-Making: Business Architecture deliverables provide a data-driven foundation for strategic decisions. Executives gain a clear picture of capabilities, gaps, and value streams, enabling them to prioritize initiatives that maximize business value.
IT Alignment: Business Architecture fosters a shared understanding between business and IT. IT leaders can leverage these deliverables to align technology investments with business needs, ensuring a return on investment.
Improved Efficiency and Agility: Business Architecture helps identify and eliminate inefficiencies. Optimized value streams and streamlined processes lead to greater operational agility, allowing organizations to adapt quickly to changing market conditions.
While their roles can overlap, there's a key distinction between Business Architects and Enterprise Architects. To recognize and understand that distinction, it’s helpful to first differentiate between Business Architecture and Enterprise Architecture.
Enterprise Architecture can be subdivided into four different architectural domains: business, data, applications, and technology. Therefore, Business Architecture is not a separate discipline outside of EA but a critical component that outlines how to execute against business strategy.
The Business Architecture Guild’s Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK) defines Business Architecture as the “blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands.” This indicates that rather than spending a great deal of time mired in the organization’s technology and processes as a whole, Business Architecture is about the organization’s strategy and enabling the execution of that strategy effectively.
It follows then that the goals of Business Architecture are also the goals of Enterprise Architecture. Business Architects and Enterprise Architects both play crucial roles in shaping and optimizing organizational structures and processes, but they have different focuses and scopes within the broader field of Enterprise Architecture.
So, how does it work in practice? How significantly does the day-to-day of an Enterprise Architect differ from a Business Architect, for example, with both of them working to empower the business with technology?
Enterprise Architects have a much broader scope encompassing more than just the business aspects. They work toward alignment of the entire organization, including the IT infrastructure, technology, and data architecture, with the strategy.
Business Architects focus primarily on the business side of an organization. Their key areas of work are:
While their titles share a common thread, it’s clear that Business Architects and Enterprise Architects have distinct areas of focus. In essence, the Business Architect focuses on the "what" and "why" of the business, while the Enterprise Architect bridges the gap between the "what" and the "how" with technology.
Business Architects do not necessarily sit within an organization’s Enterprise Architecture team. Depending on the complexity, maturity, and structure of a given organization, there could be dedicated teams focused on Business Architecture that are separate from the Enterprise Architecture team. Regardless, close collaboration between them is necessary to ensure comprehensive support and overview of an organization. .
Solutions Architects focus on designing specific technical solutions to meet business requirements. Business Architects, however, take a broader perspective, ensuring that the solution aligns with the organization's overall Business Architecture.
Solutions architects delve deeper into the technical aspects of specific initiatives. They analyze business needs and translate them into technical solutions, selecting and integrating appropriate technologies. Business Architects, however, maintain a broader perspective. They are concerned with the overall business capabilities and how technology can be leveraged to enhance them rather than focusing on the intricacies of specific solutions.
Business analysts typically focus on specific business processes or projects. Business Architects, on the other hand, have a more strategic outlook, looking at the big picture and how different processes and projects contribute to the overall business strategy.
While both Business Architects and business analysts play crucial roles in understanding and optimizing business processes, their focus areas differ. Business analysts typically concentrate on a specific project or problem, analyzing requirements, documenting processes, and developing solutions for those immediate needs. Business Architects, on the other hand, take a more holistic view. They establish a framework for the entire organization, ensuring alignment between business strategy, capabilities, and processes across all projects and initiatives.
How do Business Architects translate grand visions into actionable plans? While not IT specialists, Business Architects do use various tools to document, analyze, and communicate their findings and create effective solutions. Here are some key tools:
The specific tools used will vary depending on the organization and the Business Architect's area of expertise.
A successful Business Architect possesses a unique blend of skills and experience. Here are some key attributes:
While many Business Architects have a background in IT, with their heavier focus on the business side of things, they may also have a strong background in business analytics, project management, and business consultancy. They may also have strong experience in technical architecture or EA.
To become a certified Business Architect, it’s desirable to have the following qualifications:
Two notable industry groups when it comes to Business Architecture and architects are:
The Ardoq platform’s flexible metamodel positions it well for Business Architects seeking to quickly leverage various established frameworks or methodologies available from leading organizations in the field, such as BAG and The Open Group.
One of the organizations key to defining, maturing, and promoting Business Architecture as a discipline is BAG. Formed in 2010, their mission is to deepen knowledge of the field and as well as provide a valuable network for Business Architects to gain support and learn from fellow architects. As part of promoting best practices for the discipline, they maintain the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK®) as well as provide their own methodology for Business Architecture.
The Ardoq platform comes with a quick-start approach and bundle for leveraging the BA Guild’s metamodel for Business Architecture, including prebuilt resources to speedily establish a foundation that can be evolved and extended to meet a given organization’s needs and objectives. Ardoq’s collaborative features, such as surveys, easily integrate data collection into existing tools and workflows while pre-configured data-driven visualizations allow for quickly developing views needed to collaborate with stakeholders across the enterprise.
Ardoq’s Strategy to Execution solution covers many of a Business Architect’s key deliverables such as:
Organizations need a clear roadmap to translate strategy into action in today's competitive environment. Business Architects play a vital role in translating business strategies into actionable plans, thereby bridging the gap between strategy and execution. By aligning business capabilities with strategic objectives, Business Architects ensure the organization has the right foundation for sustainable growth and success.
Whether organizations seek to better understand what they are capable of through modeling capabilities or finding a more data-driven, effective approach to strategic execution and alignment, Ardoq offers relief from painful, manual documentation and empowers Business Architects to better fulfill their roles from a strategic perspective.
See how Ardoq can supercharge your Business Architecture initiatives today.