Business Architect in the Digital Age

What is the role of a business architect in the digital age? How do the artifacts and business architecture fit into the grand scheme of digitalization? How can a business architect provide calm and stability in the digital transformation storm?

Indeed, these are the central questions of our times as business architecture evolves from its infancy and enters the 2020s.

What is digital transformation?

CIOPages.com defines digital transformation as follows.

“Digital transformation is a customer-centric reimagination of the future of an enterprise and subsequently rethinking the business model. Reshaping the product/service portfolio, restructuring the processes, re-platforming technologies, reskilling the workforce, and instilling a new culture to get to the end goal.”

While the digitalization revolution transcends corporations and spans the government and society, we focus on the enterprise digital process and technology transformation and how business architecture and business architects can become lynchpins in the tidal shift.

Business Architect in the Digital Age

Typically, organizational transformations take distinct forms – technology-driven, structure-driven, process-driven, and people-driven. But digital transformation is not one of the shifts mentioned above; it is an amalgam of change in strategy, structure, culture,

A strategist, while they can define the north star and the strategy pillars, cannot bridge the gap to execution. While technologists can shepherd the emerging alphabet soup of technologies – R.P.A (Robotic Process Automation), A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), Blockchain, and the like – they need the context and coherence of strategy, structure, and operations. Lean Six Sigma process black belts may re-engineer the processes but are not looking at the capabilities, the core organizational building blocks, and focus on the “How.” Corporate change management experts may help shift human attitudes but will lack strategic, structural, technological, and capability perspectives.

A strategic business architect and their craft, the digital business architecture, and the artifacts can be the glue to bring diverse assets and aspects of the enterprise to converge in the pursuit of digital transformation.

The Seven Hats a Business Architect Wears:

In one of our previous blog posts, the Versatile Business Architect, we outlined the various hats and roles a business architect plays.

  • Strategy Whisperer
  • Transformation Accelerator
  • Business-Technology Bridge Builder
  • Agile Modeler
  • Go-To Wing Person
  • Impact Assessor
  • Enterprise Evolves

(Please read the Versatile Business Architect blog post for more insights and details.)

The Deliverables and Artifacts of Business Architecture:

The following are the essential components of business architecture, and business architects are responsible for either authoring or shepherding the deliverables and driving outcomes.

For example, the business architect may not define strategy, but they can interpret and distill the strategy. The business architects may not compile the business information model but work with the data folks to accomplish the objectives. A business architect may collaborate with the process owners and operations leaders for value streams.

Business Architect in the Digital Age: Deliverables

 

The Valuable Role of Business Architects in the Digital Age

As we discussed all along, the nature of digital transformation is not implementing a shiny new thing (even though there may be some of it) or optimizing processes (also though there is some of that), or working on a new culture (and yes companies have to “be digital” not just “do” digital) or improving design (even though it may be a critical success factor. Instead, the reality is that a triangulation of several of these vectors prudently sparks an authentic digital business transformation.

So, it is not just about producing something; enabling, accelerating, amplifying, and clarifying various facets of an enterprise is essential to digitalization success. A business architect is the best person to play this multi-faceted role.

Hence, the digital wave is a golden opportunity for business architects and the discipline of business architecture to shine.

Next Steps in Becoming a digital business architect: