The Business Architect[i]
The Need for the Business Architect
The following scenarios illustrate important situations that call for the talents of a practitioners with Business Architecture training:
Scenario I
“As CEO, you have a great strategy from a top consulting firm and everything your organization is doing is aligned with the strategy, however nothing seems to be working properly. There is discord among your employees, the organization is not achieving its goals and is losing ground to competitors, and access to capital is becoming strained.”
Scenario II
“Your organization has purchased a competitor and directed the IT team to convert the acquired company’s branches onto your technology platform, resulting in widely varying cost and time estimates, requests to change the way the branches do business and potential marketing and legal consequences regarding customer offerings.”
Scenario III
“Your organization wants to implement a new ERP system. You have learned that you must decide between costly customizations to support your existing way of doing business, adopting its ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality which may require changes in some of the operations of the organization, and implementing and maintaining a hybrid solution.”
Scenario IV
“Competitors are entering your marketplace and eating into your market share.”
Each of the above scenarios is typical within organizations, and they do not occur in a vacuum. Generally there are other initiatives competing for precious time, attention, and funding. In a static, unchanging global environment, with unfettered access to pertinent information, an unlimited budget and unconstrained time frames, the decisions and management of resulting efforts would be easy. However, this is the real world, and it will take a broad view of the organization, a thorough understanding of the activities and concerns of the functional departments (e.g., sales, marketing, manufacturing, HR, IT), and professional business judgment.
What a Business Architect is
A Business Architect is the member of the SBO™ team whose primary responsibility is to take the “big picture” future view of the structure of the organization.
A Business Architect is generally responsible for both ongoing and project-based work, and provides services in important situations and strategic implementation.
Ongoing Work: Business Architects perform comprehensive high-level scans of all of the factors that may affect organizational design to assess organizational health, identify incongruent structure or content and uncover valuable opportunities; including the economy, political trends, competitive marketplace and customer preferences. To assist in this effort, the Business Architect solicits input from the strategy and market research groups, vendors, line managers, subject matter experts, consultants, and line employees. Business Architects advise Executive Management and keep them informed of new concepts, trends and ways of thinking that may affect decision-making.
Project Work: Changes in strategy, issues and opportunities discovered during scans, and good ideas bubbling up from within the organization are converted into business architecture initiatives executed by operations and line managers and passed to the project management group for implementation.
Strategic Middleman: The Business Architecture Group acts as the middleman between the strategy team and the functional departments.
Business Architecture Group Strategic Mission
The Business Architecture Group partners with appropriate experts to develop options for bringing the corporate strategy to life, securing Executive Management approval, presenting necessary changes to the right audiences in the right way to achieve adoption, and administering implementation to ensure the complete solution is correctly implemented and properly modified to accommodate local conditions.
Diagram A Diagram B
Diagram A illustrates an environment without a Business Architect. Note the lines from the Strategy show only one way communication resulting in an inconsistent interpretation by the individual departments and lack of coordinated response, often resulting in conflicting and incongruent solutions.
Diagram B illustrates an environment with the participation of a Business Architect. The strategy message is translated into actionable initiatives for each department and coordinated to ensure a cohesive plan. Arrows indicate two-way communication in all directions, representative of continuous feedback, re-evaluation, and realignment necessitated by local conditions. The deliverables are much more likely to result in improvements to both the corporate strategy and its implementation.
What the Business Architect Does
With the help of Subject Matter Experts (SME), the Business Architect converts high-level strategy and business needs of the organization into holistically complete, coordinated, sequenced business models that are broken down into the project sets necessary for implementation.
The Business Architect researches the feasibility of new initiatives, assesses emerging opportunities, leads pilot studies and addresses organizational sustainability, risks and challenges.
The Business Architect provides a conduit between corporate-wide strategy, innovations and best practices, and the functional departments, and maintains the organizations global business rules.
The Business Architect prepares and presents business cases for high-level initiatives to Executive Management for approval, funding, resource allocation and prioritization.
The Business Architect facilitates cross-organizational knowledge-sharing forums among Subject Matter Experts and mentors new team members.
[i] Excerpt from "Business Architecture: An Emerging Profession." Paul A. Bodine and Jack Hilty, Edited by Janice Koerber, 2009.