Evolution of Business Architecture^[i]

The origin of the term “Business Architect” is derived from the longer history of the building architect whose competencies in design, communication and project oversight are recognized by the general population.  Throughout the years, a business leader who launches a successful new company or designs a better way of going to market or accomplishing work is often referred to in business publications as the “architect of the business.”

Responsibility for the cross-organizational design of the business as a whole, the work of the Business Architect has historically fallen to the CEO or their assignee, supported by generalist management consulting firms whose teams of MBAs work with corporate managers to transform strategy into new business configurations using the newest tools.

Important advances in this area borrowed from the operations discipline came in 1993 in the form of Michael Hammer and James Champy’s book Reengineering the Corporation[ii], which introduced tools for mapping and optimizing business activities using process modeling.  The Balanced Scorecard[iii] developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton at about the same time enabled the business to measure overall corporate success against goals on qualitative as a well as quantitative dimensions.

These tools, together with the ability to quickly test sophisticated business scenarios against great volumes of data (made possible by the broad availability of electronic spreadsheets operating on fast, inexpensive personal computers) enabled practitioners to “build companies on paper”, running the financial scenarios (models) and sensitivity analyses required to identify business configurations that produced the highest NPV[iv] with the lowest risk. Statistical analysis, for the first time in history, began to consistently outperform experience and judgment in decision-making.

The arrival of Internet technologies like email, instant messaging and online data repositories in the mid-1990s opened up tremendous flexibilities in the ways co-workers could collaborate, while the new ability of buyers and sellers to interact in virtual space and transact online changed the traditional structure of businesses.

This allowed new flexibility in designing and structuring businesses, and introduced new business architectures: e.g., peer-to-peer, mass customization and swarming.

By the late 1990s, MBAs and advanced skills in Internet technologies began developing live business models for e-commerce websites in real-time.  They used the development tools to both represent and build the business at the same time. The model became the business and thousands were launched.  Thousands of businesses meant thousands of competitors gathering volumes of data and responding quickly to market conditions using these Internet tools.

Remaining competitive in this new marketplace  required these complex businesses to undergo nearly constant change; major changes that at one time would have been made once every several years.

Designing and overseeing the implementation of these changes required greater time and more extensive training than was allowed by the CEO’s time-blocked schedule.

Enter the Business Architect.

Although the term “Architect” had long been associated with designers, the term “Business Architect” first gained traction with the 2001-2002 launch of DePaul University’s Business Architecting course taught by Paul A. Bodine within its MBA program in Chicago.  A Google search on “Business Architect” at the time returned just 12 results.

This was closely followed in 2003 by the launch of the first professional association supporting Business Architects, the Business Architects Association®, which confers the Certified Business Architect (CBA)®[v] certification. By 2006, several consulting firms had begun advertising Business Architect expertise.  A Google search on “Business Architect” in 2009 returns over 1 million listings. 

This is just the beginning of a valuable and rapidly expanding profession. Today’s Business Architects take a holistic view of the complete business representing all interests and engaging all expertise.  They see the business organization as a constantly changing, dynamic organism that balances central planning with individual initiative to achieve its mission through the articulate implementation of its corporate strategy.

The IT Department’s Acute Needs

IT departments’ need for Business Architecture services is particularly acute, causing many to take the lead in calling for the formation of Business Architecture Groups.

In the information technology world, the arrival of practical computers in the 1950s led to the creation of resource planning programs used to manage and optimize manufacturing processes in the 1960’s.  As the quality and scope of these programs matured in the 1970s, software firms began to see the opportunity for further expansion of these programs to encompass associated nonmanufacturing business activities like purchasing, billing and order fulfillment. 

The 1980s saw the integrated ERP system expanded to the entire organization, and the rise of an advanced technologist role, the Enterprise Architect.  The Enterprise Architect was charged with designing the corporation’s physical technology infrastructure and setting standards for computer coding languages and communication protocols to ensure the organization’s computer systems would be able to communicate with each other.

These ERP and other organization-wide systems require gathering and modeling information from throughout the organization. However, many of the technologist’s tools and methodologies were developed without full involvement of other parts of the organization, resulting in a somewhat static, insular view of the business and difficulty in effectively understanding and providing for their needs at a pace they needed.

The arrival of the Internet greatly increased the organization’s ability to quickly adapt to market conditions and put pressure on technology departments to develop volumes of technology-enabled capabilities quickly.  This increased the need for tight integration with all parts of the organization, further exacerbating the problem.

As technology has matured, from mainframe--to timeshare--to distributed computing--to peer-to-peer--to web services accessed through cloud computing, users are demanding direct online support as they are unwilling to tolerate a website they can’t master without training.  This has forced technology departments to abandon the monolithic approach of dictating standards and compensating for poor user interfaces with enforced training.  Now user communities demand the ability to interact directly with the data and technology layers, enabling them to design and structure their websites themselves.

By 2004, IT departments were clamoring for the services of those who could provide them with comprehensive models that capture and communicate the dynamics and trajectory of the constantly changing business from which they could scope and plan future technology needs and engage the eager participation of other parts of the business. This is the work of the Business Architect. 

The IT departments of numerous leading organizations have stepped ahead and formed Business Architecture Groups within their companies from their own personnel, many finding a manager on the business side to sponsor them as a way of beginning to engender participation and acceptance from the organization as a whole.

As these groups add members from other departments of the organization who speak the department’s language, understand them culturally, and can correctly represent their concerns, they will begin to earn the trust of other managers, have access to needed subject matter experts, attract cross-organizational sponsorship from Executive Management and deliver the structural information needed by all of the departments, not just IT.