Post # 2
To continue our pursuit of clarity and resolving confusions, we come to the next area of ambiguity: that of Business Architecture and Business Analysis.
I make heavy use of Nick Malik's discussions on this post, and will try to relate them with the previous discussion of Business Context vs Business Architecture. I hope that sharing Nick's post can move us closer to more clarity.
Nick came up with his own definitions below, which I think is useful, and builds on the notion of capability in our discussions.
Business Architect – A role within various types of enterprises (business, government, non-profit) that is focused on collecting information on the strategic positioning of an area of activity (line of business, business unit, department, team, etc.) and creating a clear picture of the capability gaps that may impede that area from reaching it’s full and required potential.
Business Analyst – A role either within an information technology division of an enterprise, or within a non-IT team serving as a key point of contact with an IT division. This role is focused on understanding the root cause of a specific business problem in order to develop the IT requirements needed to address that problem.
The following is Nick's separation of job descriptions and expectations, which can add to fine-tuning our way of defining the inter-related tasks of the so-called Business Architecture discipline.
The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABoK version 2) specifically states:
“A business analyst is any person who performs business analysis activities, no matter what their job title or organizational role may be. Business analysis practitioners include not only people with the job title of business analyst, but may also include business systems analysts, systems analysts, requirements engineers, process analysts, product managers, product owners, enterprise analysts, business architects, management consultants, or any other person who performs the tasks described in the BABOK Guide, including those who also perform related disciplines such as project management, software development, quality assurance, and interaction design.”
Summary:
There are indeed many attempts to define boundaries and distinctions for the business architect and business analyst roles. However, going back to our discussion in the previous post, we again see why there can be a confusion on these roles. If we agree that by virtue of the deliverables of the areas of business context and business architecture being so closely related, we can also agree that we can just easily map the job descriptions and task expectations for the business architect and business analyst, without being too fussy about which role these tasks are placed.
No wonder that there are many organizations who ignore the difference, because it's really just one tightly related set of tasks, that there's not that much to be gained by spending time fiddling with semantics. We can perhaps even think of the business architect as an expanded role of the business analyst. Let's just define the tasks for such an expanded role and move on.
In the end, as Nick Malik keenly points out, the Business Analyst and Business Architect are really best taken as complementary roles. "Regardless of what we want to happen, reality is going to keep getting in the way. Both roles exist. Sometimes they intersect." And while Nick speaks of a "real challenge" from when two people have to play complementary roles, as in this case of business architect, and business analyst, I really see no big issues as long as the complete and distinct set of expected deliverables and artifacts are well-defined and corresponds to our notions of outputs for defining business context, and business architecture. After all, intuitively, all of these activities that we speak of really fall under the big umbrella of the critical thinking exercise called analysis of the business.
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References:
Nick Malik. (2012 April 6). The difference between business architect and business analyst. Online Blog. Retrieved from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/nickmalik/2012/04/06/the-difference-between-business-architect-and-business-analyst
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What a surprise on this post! On Part 1, I commented about how we are still struggling to understand the difference between Business Architect and Business Analyst roles in my organization. And here goes your explanation on that. Makes complete sense and this is the post that I am taking back to my work. Thank you very much for sharing this.
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