Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheBusinessArchitect/~3/jSdnPYYFLoQ/
Last week I taught a half-day workshop on Kick-starting Business Architecture at the 2013 Building Business Capability conference in Las Vegas. I had 75 participants from a wide variety of backgrounds including business architects, business analysts, enterprise architects, project managers, business process managers, business managers, and strategists. A very diverse group to say the least. One of the exercises we did was brainstorming the skills necessary to become a successful business architect. The group generated 250 skill cards (duplicates were allowed as there were multiple brainstorming groups). We then sorted the identified skills into themes and plotted them based on the number of items within each theme to show the relative weight of occurrence. Here is what the group came up as a summary:
Here are some of the details within each category:
Communications. Communication skills included the usual suspects of written, presentation, and verbal skills but listening also showed up more than once.
Leadership. Leadership included a wide variety of skills including negotiation, persuasion, salesmanship, teaching, managing, change management, conflict resolution, bridge building, and being politically astute.
Analysis. Analysis was made up of skills like technical translator, systems thinking, analytical, abstraction, attention to detail, problem solving, pattern recognition, modeling, logical thinking, and holistic thinking.
Vision. Vision included the skills of big picture thinking, forward thinking, being innovative, and visioning.
Business knowledge. This category included skills such as business domain knowledge, business process knowledge, business acumen, business oriented, financial awareness, and industry knowledge.
Personally traits. The group was really sharp to discern personality attributes from skills and even sharper still for their categorization of personally traits into learned and innate groups. Some items in the innate personality traits group were brave, compassionate, curious, empathetic, extroversion, intelligent, and sense of humor. In the learned personality trait category were adaptable, approachable, assertive, credibility, flexible, humility, and being a quick start. You might argue which should be learned versus innate, but for a 20-minute exercise, the group got a good handle on the difference.
The best skill identified? Get’er’done’er. You just have to love that one.
The bottom line:_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Whatever your view on the business architect skill set, it is pretty clear that it covers lots of territory. No matter how sharp you think you are, you can’t do it all. This is one of the reasons I think successful business architecting is a collaborative effort. Two other things jump out at me. One is that there is plenty of room for leaning and we should all get busy developing a wider range of skills. The second is that interpersonal skills/traits/behaviors play a big role in our success as business architects. Take a good long look in the mirror.
Tagged: Business Architecture, career 
