Participants in business architecture discussion groups and training seminars often ask about the profile of the business architect. This is an important question because enterprises establishing and expanding business architecture efforts are seeking individuals to staff centers of excellence and project teams.  What skills should such a person have? What attributes describe the business architect? In my experience, the most important attribute that I look for in a business architect is the ability to see the “forest for the trees”.

Senior management wants to get serious about consolidating and managing customer information. Customer contact and related information is scattered across dozens of business units, each of which updates and manages this information in unique, nontransparent ways. Continuing the current piecemeal approach to customer management, however, creates severe roadblocks to servicing customers more effectively, streamlining operations and competing with other companies in your industry.

In December 2007 through January 2008, the BPM Institute surveyed the Business Architecture Bulletin list to gain insights into the nature of business architecture work. The survey’s goal was to identify who is performing business architecture work, ascertain related goals, determine the nature of the work being performed and identify service and tool preferences.

Business architecture enables an enterprise to turn business strategy into operational reality through the visualization and resolution of cross-functional inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. Consider the following scenario found in a US federal government agency....

BrainStorm’s latest Business Architecture conference in Chicago has come and gone, and while mid-April snowstorms like the one that struck the conference are fortunately few and far between, unfortunately a constant chorus that was heard from presenter after presenter was not; to wit: business architecture is facing a crippling communications problem.

Mention enterprise governance to executives and they typically respond with blank stares or indignant looks. One common response is to hand people the organization (“org”) chart, a set of boxes showing who reports to whom. Another response is to state that governance is a board level or senior management concern and we have no business broaching the topic. Org charts, sloganeering and political posturing are tangential to real enterprise governance because they have little to do with the intricate complexities, relationships, redundancies and cross-functional workings of an enterprise.

It’s always exciting to attend a large conference bustling with like-minded people, especially when the subject matter teeters on the cutting edge of a new market space, and BrainStorm’s Business Architecture Conference in New York City last November was no exception. It was my first Business Architecture conference and BrainStorm’s second, but no college curriculum could possibly rival the depth and scope of the information imparted to me during those two days. From the opening remarks through the final wrap-up, I was intrigued and completely captivated as speaker after speaker p

Executives have mandated that the organization deploy new strategies while getting more productivity from its workforce. This requires business unit consolidation, alternative market exploration, new product and service deployment, and a myriad of other actions. These activities, in turn, spawn a demand for infrastructure upgrades and technology redeployment. Unfortunately, the gap between strategy and actionable results is growing.