Business architect

A business architect is a practitioner of business architecture, a discipline concerned with developing and maintaining business capabilities of the enterprise in line with the corporate strategy as well as contributing to the business strategy and plans. This also includes design of capability models and related architectural solutions of business tasks, mapping capability functionality to the internal and external resources, developing business transformation plans jointly with senior business management, handling business solutions to the delivery and operational business functions of the company, developing and maintaining architectural governance and controls over implementation. For each step of the business transformation plan, business architects contribute in development of a blueprint of the enterprise in order to promote a common understanding of the organization and alignment of strategic objectives with tactical demands.

Given that the business architecture as a distinct discipline is relatively young, the role of a business architect is often relative to the organization. A business architect can operate on one or more levels of the organization depending on the level of maturity of the architecture practice within that organization. Nonetheless, there is a difference between architectural and analysis works: the former concerns core organising rather abstractive organisation of business while the latter is more about implementation of architectural abstractions.

Since a business architecture practice is closely related to the discipline of enterprise architecture in a way that it provides a foundation for the enterprise architecture, the role of a business architect is sometimes fulfilled by an enterprise architect.

Skills and competencies of a business architect determine the level of an organization at which the architect can operate. In a broader sense, it is the combination of soft skills, knowledge of business, system thinking, change management techniques, awareness in business changes in the economic environment and technology. More specifically, commonly sought after characteristics of a good business architect are:

A Guide to Business Architecture Body of Knowledge by the Business Architecture Guild publishes evolving list of skills and competencies for business architects and for other roles relevant to the business architecture practice. Additionally, the major areas of concerns of business architects are depicted for the Business Architecture in a Dynamic Market.

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