Musings on Enterprise Architects, Business Architects and glorified Business Analysts
I am consulting with Enterprise Architects of a multinational client, helping define a framework for EA modeling. An area of emerging interest in the group here is around Business Architecture. The members of the core Enterprise Architecture team are seasoned technologists who also have a good grounding of the enterprise drivers and challenges. While they have grounding in the “Business of IS” it is not necessarily the “business” of the organization, which is to say they are not functional experts in HR, Finance or other operational areas.
As I observe and to some extent facilitate the evolution of the Enterprise Architects in the group to don additional hat of Business Architects, I am also reflecting on trends I have seen in the industry: evolution of Business Analysts. Many Business Analysts I have worked with come from a few distinct backgrounds, including:
- Technical Analysts and support staff turned Business Analysts. I have come across many good technical support people (say from the help-desk) who have morphed into Business Analysts successfully. From the time spent working with end-users, they bring in a good “user perspective” to the systems analysis and design but may not always have a “big picture” perspective.
- Management Graduates, MBAs and those from Management Consulting background: These folks bring in a good analytic perspective and “big picture” thinking. They come with a plethora of jargons - SWAG or SWAT and whatnot – but may sometimes need to be goaded towards the basic mantra of KISS.
- Trained modelers : Specialists with some technical and/or functional background who have undergone formal training in Business Process Modelling (with or without a tool). This genera of Business Process Analysts seem to have a great affinity towards the formal modelling techniques - including BPMN, BPML – but may need the support of experts with functional and technical depth to define meaningful models.
Perhaps less than a decade ago the term “Architect” caught the fancy of the IS and software community and many technologists – including senior folks we used to call Systems Analysts – took on the Architect Moniker. Given that there is now a renewed interest among Enterprise Architects to take on additional focus on Business Architecture, which is by itself highly contextual to individual enterprises, I wonder if the traditional BA (Business Analyst) community is also going to join the bandwagon.
Sure, more the merrier one could say: include all Entrerprise Architects and Business Analysts to the Business Architecture Party. But I am tempted to ask: will the REAL Business Architects, who are actually Architecting their Businesses raise their hands please?
Comments
Mohan,
You are right, the issue would be that Business Analyst will think Business Architecture as Process Architecture or Process Modeling whereas Business Architecture is much more than that. Most EAs tend to focus on technical aspects rather than looking at the entire spectrum because of the organisational culture and because of that business people will always think EAs as Technical. Though EAs do not neccessarily need to be functional experts.
Posted by: Raj Sadasivan | March 12, 2009 02:13 PM
Raj
I agree; No easy ways of looking at this. Business Architecture is much more than Process Architecture / Modeling and documentation. Added to the organizational culture, I guess it is the technologist culture that EAs need to combat: a good many EAs - self included – come from a strong technologist background and may/may not have the functional depth of operational (business) specialists and experts.
Posted by: Mohan Babu K | March 16, 2009 02:02 PM
The term "business architect" is not standardized. (Indeed, most terms in IT are not.) But in my recent book Value-Driven IT (see Amazon or http://ValueDrivenIT.com ) I propose that a business architect is a person who can speak to all of the important issues within their business domain - including technical important issues. I see no reason to differentiate technical from non-technical: if an issue is important, the business architect should be familiar with it.
As Mohan (above) points out, business architecture is more than functional architecture. It is also the financial architecture: the cash flows for example, and other sources of value.
A business architect must be able to link financial architecture to functional architecture and technical architecture, and integrate all of these in order to make good strategic decisions.
Further, since business is largely about time to market, a good business architect must focus only on the issues that matter, rather than treating architecture as something to do for its own sake. The point is not to dot all the i's in the architecture, but to identify the issues and make good holistic decisions.
- Cliff
Posted by: Cliff Berg | March 16, 2009 11:20 PM
Mohan - you're absolutely correct - there are too many people who specialize in a single silo of expertise - on the information systems side or on the business side - without proper consideration of the holistic solution. To me the key is to have cross functional teams that bridge the gap. I think that the term "Business Architect" is not realistically a single person but rather multiple people who are not stuck in a single mindset. As a software architect, I cannot fully appreciate the concerns of the HR or accounting role. But I can translate the concerns of the business representative into a solution. Likewise, the HR representative does not relate, nor care about, the issues, for example, associated with an enterprise caliber implementation of an HR solution. Therefore, it is the responsibility of a "bridge" team to meld the two worlds together. That is the "business architecture" team.
Posted by: Scott | March 22, 2009 04:20 AM
Mohan, you do come on as being really cynical in this :) And justifiably so! The roles and names in the last few years have gone really pompous and lacking in meat! Now that we tire of the buzzwords and jargon, in live IT projects, people are paying more respect than ever to some of us who fit the role description. And none holds more respect in a project who can carry off an overarching view of the project - from a business, technical, architectural and management perspective. Yes - there are a breed of such people; and in this climate, they do earn a lot of respect !
Posted by: Thomas | April 9, 2009 08:17 PM