Sunday 20 December 2009

Confusion between the role of a Business Architect and the subject of business architecture.

I have been involved in another of those intellectual discussions on the Linkedin Business Architecture Group and there are some folks getting mixed up with their definitions; so I thought I would copy and paste my post here as well as it adds value to this blog. Some folks are defiing business architecture by what they do based on the scope of there role when the activity is done by several roles inclusing that of the executive board.

An implicit or "non visible" business architecture exists even in organisations that do not call it that or even realise they have one.

I mean that: in these cases the "business strategy, mission statements, objectives, and goals are developed by senior management" is the underlying business architecture which as yet has not been crafted into a communicated form by a business architect. i.e. all businesses have the relationships between the various business elements most have not yet extracted them and presented the information in an architecture.

It is like saying that DNA had a structure before Crick and Watson discovered it but now we can see it as the human genome.

What you do as your job, scope, as a business architect is a different matter and doesnt impact on the definition of business architecture. For example I heard an CFO say " My colleagues and I on the board are the business architects ".meaning they set the rules, strategy and the design of the business. Scoping of roles is very different to defining a term such as business architecture as roles will overlap process, activites and subject areas.

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