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?

Generated by BlogIt

BlogIt - Auto Blogging Software for YOU!