What is your role as a business architect?

To conneting the dots, find value proposition for each initiatives by tbe stakeholders and ensure all initiative are aligned with target state architecture. However in huge enterprise, the EA is busy doing the chop board than making strategy.

As a business architect, you play a pivotal role in shaping an organization's strategy and operations. I'd focus on contributing to strategy development, ensuring alignment with operational capabilities. Analyzing business capabilities is critical for informed decision-making. Process improvement enhances operational efficiency. Collaborating for system integration is crucial for effective execution. Engaging stakeholders ensures alignment and understanding. Managing governance and compliance is essential for organizational success. Pro tip: Use business architecture tools like ABACUS or BiZZdesign for capability analysis and process optimization, facilitating effective strategy implementation and operational efficiency.

Business architects have the ability to align business goals and technology implementation by understanding the organization's strategic objectives. They excel at communication & collaborating with different teams, to ensure a cohesive approach to business transformation and effectively bridge the gap between business leaders and technology experts by translating complex concepts into understandable terms. They take a comprehensive view of the organization, considering various factors such as people, processes, systems, and technology, to develop a strategic roadmap for the future. They are adaptable, creative and have a problem-solving approach when it comes to innovate new business processes or modernize existing ones.

In addition to that; - Defining the organizational values/shared values - Identify the industry and business scope - Identify purpose of the business - Defining goals and objectives are also important in strategy development exercise.

In reality this is quite complex, to be effective the Business Architect supports a strategic framework to be consistent across the organisation, but reality says that senior execs like to be the one dictating where things goes, who needs a framework to be a single language of communication strategic objectives right? How this is resolved? In my experience is better to start small with an area with total buy-in, demonstrate the value of a standardised strategy definition and communication and with a good winning story try to propagate the strategy definition framework to the rest of the organisation

Capability mapping on its own is not the most useful tool - it requires quite a high level of abstraction when you're thinking about how a business operates, and therefore won't necessarily be relatable for everyone. What is important is how you connect capabilities to the people, processes, technology and data which supports them; in doing so you can identify where digital transformation is needed, highlight resourcing issues and, when faced with change, quickly build a picture of how it could impact your organisation. Another important consideration is capabilities you don't have, but which are key to your business strategy; understanding what's missing can inform strategic moves such as mergers and acquisitions.

Business-IT perspective on Capability maps - of great value or a money pit. Some lessons learnt 1] "Good is good enough". Work our way up from an industry model and don’t get caught in a paralysis. It should be left at a strategic planning level and avoid decomposing down. 2 Being an abstract and stable concept it is ideal to align relatively volatile organization structures, Programs, IT Functions. 3. Use it conjunction with other strategic planning tools such as TOM, SWOT, long-range planning . This adds relevance and insights. 4 Focus on specific tangible outcomes. The capability map and can be multiple things but never all at once. 5 Value is in the insights and not how pretty it looks. Focus on how we can articulate data and measures.

No. Capabilities for an Enterprise change rarely. If you are in an Enterprise without a Capability map (It is helpful, sometimes) then get an industry model. Capabilities are static. They should not change unless the business model changes. After 35 years in this “role” we switched to Capability vs. Process focus. Capability is at the top of the chain. Process is what we understand, the customer understands and the users understand. Capability maps are out there everywhere. I do not believe they add value in the Business operations of a company.

Capability Mapping is one of the hardest elements on Business Architecture, while the value can be immense in the right hands it usually too abstract to people to get it, also it is usually confused with a process hierarchy map which usually will already exists. In my experience capability mapping needs a critical objective from the get-go, for example we use it in a new Utility as a way to guide the digital elements that were needed to activate each capability, this was quite successful, but dealt with heaps of people simply nos interested in to define their initiatives and work based on the capability map, if not supported by key stakeholders can be a very expensive waste of time

yes yes yes, for a business architect to have a deep understanding of process management and BPMN is critical for a successful establishment of business Architecture frameworks, the reason being that process is the "how" of a business capability, when we explain a "what" we need for a business area in the form of a capability the immediate question is then "how" we do it, and that is the process design governed by BPMN, having a strong knowledge across both practice i believe is a fundamental of a senior well rounded business architect