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For some time now I have been promoting the idea that the practice of business architecture is not about creating blueprints and models but applying a set of tools and techniques to form broader perspectives, create deeper insight, and solve business problems. If business architecture is a practice then what is its portfolio of services? I have created my take on the business architect’s service portfolio and broken it down into four categories: strategy development and articulation services, organizational performance services, organizational change services, and project support services. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list that completely describes the business architecture practice but a starting place to spur your imagination of what can be done.Do you have other ideas? Please comment!
Project Change Services
Project risk analysis – Create standard risk models that help projects (both business and IT) understand their risk points and develop risk mitigation strategies. The big value business architects can add is providing and quantifying a more comprehensive view of project risk including such things as team cohesiveness, problem complexity, level or organizational support, etc.
Conceptual target architecture development – Create conceptual target architectures for business problems. This might be thought of this as EA work but good conceptual architectures should first articulate business viewpoints that are technology and legacy environment independent. Create a framework to guide business leaders through assessing the relative value and risks of the architectural options.
Business process development – Support business units in business process design and redesign. Think of this as process design at the logical level. The work done here can be passed on to a BPM or process design team focused on driving out implementation details.
Requirements definition assistance and assessment – Support the requirements process by providing the broader organizational perspective, clarifying the connection to strategy and capabilities. This integrates well with the project risk analysis and conceptual architecture work.
Change management – Help project leaders understand, assess, and plan for organizational change triggered by their project. The technical aspects for most projects are well understood and easily managed by the project leader. It is often the external issues of buy-in, training, coordinating with other project implementations that impinge on success. For large, complex projects, internal project team changes can also be significant.
Road mapping support – While road mapping is a relatively low level skill that supports other business architecture services, it can be applied as a standalone service to help teams plan and visualize their projects. Create a set of ready-to-use roadmap templates that can be applied to visualize different project aspects. In addition to typical project timelines create roadmaps for capability evolution, staffing changes, and knowledge acquisition.
In the next post, I will look at the process of service development.
Tagged: Business Architecture, Business Architecture Practice 
