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”.
Consider the multitude of issues facing the business architect. Management teams want insights into structural issues, functional interdependencies and cross-silo redundancies to understand the best ways to plan and deploy various business initiatives. Executives do not come to the business architecture group because they want to streamline a human resources process or connect two splintered processes within a claims group. On the contrary, executives bring the most challenging issues to the business architecture team – many of which still require articulation and clarification.
These challenges can involve addressing issues as diverse as cost consolidation across functional areas, portfolio management of product offerings, bringing transparency to customer interactions and information across divisional silos, acquisition planning or other horizontal business issues. Many of the areas involved in these discussions have already begun modeling business processes or have launched IT related solutions. These activities must be incorporated into the situation analysis. The business architecture team is normally engaged only after heated debates within management meetings that have gone around in circles and ended in stalemate.
When confronted with these kinds of challenges, many individuals are predisposed to model every process, identify every user interface, take a deep dive into every silo or launch an unwarranted IT project. Teams can be overwhelmed by overlapping or disconnected business processes, armloads of spreadsheets, endless numbers of Visio drawings or rambling narratives. Many of the proposed solutions never bothered to articulate the issues, the relevant and affected organizational structures, the impacts of governance and basic terminology, and cross-functional / cross-disciplinary relationships. This is the world that awaits the business architect.
The business architect must be able to assimilate and correlate this information, discard irrelevant details, represent conflicting structures and tie it all back to the most pressing management issues driving the analysis. In addition, the business architect must be able to visualize and create high-level models that can be used to assess not just the one-off problem but also serve as a foundation for future analysis on other initiatives. Every business architecture project provides more depth and breadth to the previously established blueprint and brings more insights into the vast workings of the business.
Here are some basic attributes of a business architect. The business architect should have a foundational vision on how to assimilate complex and possibly conflicting information in ways that can hide or expose the details when and where required. In addition, the business architect should be comfortable with creating or using model based representations that can be adjusted as required to collect, aggregate or disaggregate complex and conflicting information about the business. The business architect must also be able to expand or contract underlying models of the business to accommodate new scenarios and priorities as they arise.
Finally, the business architect must be able to provide management with visualizations of the issues in ways that they can understand. Executives do not want and do not need all of the details that the business architecture contains. Executives tend to prefer simplistic views of capability models, value chains, information structures or governance structures that convey just enough of the source of the problem (i.e. the as-is) and solution options (i.e. the to-be options).
What are signs that a given individual may not be an ideal business architect? This is more difficult to determine but here are some clues. If a person cannot see the big picture or think holistically, this individual is likely a poor candidate for business architect. If an individual can only think in terms of business processes, as opposed to holistic business architecture models that tie together many representations and disciplines, this is likely a poor candidate for business architect. Finally, the individual that cannot communicate to management in one scenario and business analysts and IT architects in alternative scenarios is likely a poor business architect candidate.
The business architect is renaissance-like with the ability to simplify high degrees of complexity in a way that helps everyone get to solutions. Above all, the business architect must be able to not only see the forest for the trees – but help others see that same forest in ways that make sense to them and help them do their jobs more effectively.
