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Analysis, Synthesis, and Scope: Business Architecture vs. Business Analysis, part two

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A few days ago, I quickly dashed off a post on the difference between a business architect and a business analyst.  The reaction was immediate and rather vociferous.  The IIBA took me to task for saying that a business architect is NOT a business analyst.  In addition, Tom Graves (Enterprise Architect) asked me to consider the possibility that the two roles are primarily different in another way, altogether.  Tom asked me to consider the possibility that an architect role is primarily one of synthesis (putting things together), while an analyst role is one of analysis (taking things apart).  I beg to differ.  This post included my thoughts on that distinction.

Graves’ trilogy: Analyst-Anarchist-Architect

Tom has pointed out, in past articles, that there is real value for enterprise architects to consider the Hegelian triad of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.  In his post, Tom presents a triad, based on Hegelian thinking, three different roles in sequence: business analyst – business anarchist – enterprise architect.

In Tom’s thinking, the analyst is good at creating an initial hypothesis that represents incremental improvement… at doing things right.  The anarchist is the role that questions the assumptions underlying the analysis.  It is the role of anarchist to test those assumptions, and make sure that they do indeed align with the real world of “trial, error and experience”.  The anarchist prevents us from accepting our assumptions.  The architect puts it all back together.  According to Tom Graves:

And the architect role is about bringing it all together again. It’s the ‘synthesis’ part of the triad; but it’s also about the Concrete, about making things real, being effective – about doing the right things right in a concrete, practical way.

Here is where I have to take my hat off to Tom.  There is a very important thought process going on here, and one that I both agree with and can immediately use.  I admit to not having taken the time to really grok Tom’s post prior to now, but I couldn’t agree more with the thinking process.  You have to form an initial idea, then break apart the assumptions in order to test the initial idea, and lastly bring it all together in a solution that actually works.  It’s an excellent approach.

Shouldn’t this kind of thinking simply be a template for each individual person?  Shouldn’t one person perform all three activities?  Tom addresses this as well.

One way to resolve the architecture of that architecture is to have just one person doing all of those roles – after all, they’re different roles, not necessarily different people. But that can sometimes be quite a ‘big ask’, because each of the roles does demand different skillsets, different paradigms, even different worldviews – again, somewhat tricky.

Tom suggests that it is difficult for one person to perform all three, and that large organizations (and large markets) may have the freedom to separate out the roles into different people.  It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know if provides the clarity I’m looking for.

I believe that Tom is completely right in one respect.  Solving a problem effectively requires that you go through stages of thinking.  If you simply look at the problem and conceive of a couple possible solutions, you could just as easily fail to consider the optimum one (not on the list), or choose the wrong solution (whatever “wrong” means).  In order to reach the best possible decision, you must go through the additional steps of antithesis and synthesis. However, I don’t think that this distinction is sufficient to explain and position the roles of Business Analyst and Business Architect. 

The process of thinking through a problem applies to ALL roles that solve problems (a fairly long list).  It doesn’t just apply to business analysis.  Following the path from thesis to antithesis to synthesis is an art practiced by artisans, craftsmen, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, leaders, managers, and politicians.  It is best practice for all of human thought, and not just one area of human endeavor.  Everyone who thinks, and considers, and solves, should use all three steps.  To use Tom’s terminology, each person should be an analyst, an anarchist, and an architect.

Different Efforts, Different Results

Tom’s thought process is excellent, but I don’t believe it answers the core question.  Over the past few years, we’ve seen the emergence of two different “job titles.”  Both jobs emerged out of the need for the information technology division to address business problems in new and novel ways.  The core question that I’d like to address is simple: is this something that one person does, or something that two people do?  Are we more effective, and efficient, to separate the roles and responsibilities?

Some things we all agree on.  The business analyst role is much more tactical than the business architecture role.  Traditionally, the business analyst is required to understand the problems of a business area and to document the requirements of the business in solving them.  The business analyst is NOT accountable for developing the solution, or even the vision for the solution (The solution architect does that).  He or she is accountable for understanding the problem and documenting the requirements that the solution must meet.

The business architect role is a more recent innovation.  This role emerged out of the need to insure that departments and divisions are using IT resources correctly by asking for the right problems to be solved.  From there, the role has expanded to a non-IT-focused value proposition.  The business architecture role is important.  Without the business architect involved, we may do an excellent job of solving problems that the overall enterprise does not need solved, when the real enterprise-level problems are going unaddressed or under-resourced due to the long list of demands from the existing businesses.

The business architect is different from the business analyst because he or she is fundamentally charged with four different responsibilities:

  1. understanding the actual enterprise-level needs and the relationship between one business area in respect to the overall strategies,
  2. partitioning the services that one business area should produce and the needed level of maturity for those services,
  3. creating a vision of those services, from the perspective of the business, and
  4. insuring that it aligns to the actual and proposed architecture of the business as a whole. 

Note that (2) occurs rarely… only when major changes to the business models themselves occur. 

Some analysis will perform responsibilities (1) and skip to (3).  In most cases, that works.  On the other hand, performing responsibilities (2) and (4) requires the skills of an architect.  There are two different skill sets here.  Can one person do both?  Yes.  Should they?  That depends.

As these roles continue to mature, we need to either carve out distinctions, or merge them into a single role. 

Business Analyst and Business Architect as one person

In my prior post, I made the case that there are many differences between a business analyst and a business architect.  My prior post was based on the assumption that there needs to be two different people playing these roles.  That assumption is NOT valid in all cases. 

There are many situations where it makes a great deal of sense for the activities of business architecture and business analysis to be performed by ONE individual for financial and logistical reasons.  For example, if the IT unit in question has a small set of responsibilities, or if we are talking about a medium-to-small business (or business area), there just isn’t enough work to keep two different people employed full time in complementary roles.  Within my company (Microsoft), there are some smaller areas of the business that are covered by one individual who performs both business architecture and business analysis tasks.

The question that I have, however, is simple.  While it is possible for one person to perform two jobs, does that mean there SHOULD be one job?  Should we merge the roles so that every business analyst should be an architect, and every business architect should be an analyst?

Business Analyst and Business Architect 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.  The real challenge comes when two people have to play complementary roles, one as a business architect, and the other as a business analyst.  In larger organizations where business architects are appearing as independent roles, and in situations where consultants are being hired, this situation is increasingly common. 

In order to be effective, these two folks need to have clear accountabilities.  They need to be clearly supporting the success of one another, but able to succeed independently of one another (the failure of one cannot prevent the success of the other).  In order to meet these criteria, there is one very important distinction.  Both must have a different set of problems to solve, and both must have the full scope to solve those problems.  Both must perform the three steps of emergent thought that Tom points out: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis… or analyst, anarchist, and architect. 

There is no good source, in existence, for clarifying those accountabilities.  The Business Analysis BOK focuses on skills and methods, not accountabilities.  The Business Architecture BOK focuses on different skills and methods, but not accountabilities.  Both fields seem happy to simply overlap.  That is probably OK from the perspective of describing the fields.

However, in an actual organization, where people have jobs to do, more clarity is required.

Conclusion

No matter how we reconcile these two roles, we need to understand that the growth of business architecture will not be abated just because the profession of business analyst has laid a moral claim to the activities that business architects have decided to focus on.  Rather than argue about whether business architects are, first and foremost, analysts, lets look at whether we can address two key questions:

a) Is it better or worse for these roles to be independent?

b) When both roles exist in the same organization, how do we prevent confusion, clarify accountabilities, and make both roles effective?

Arguments don’t matter.  Answering these questions… that matters.

The difference between business architect and business analyst

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[Author’s note: within an hour of posting the following article, Kevin Brennen of the IIBA dry-roasted the post on his own blog.  You can find a link to his entry here: Business Architecture is Business Analysis.  I have made an attempt…

Its Not What You Sell, Its What You Believe – Bill Taylor – Harvard Business Review

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“Cook did not respond with a detailed review of the products Apple made or the retail environments in which it sold them. Instead, he offered an impromptu, unscripted statement of what he and everyone at Apple believed — “as if reciting a creed he had learned as a child” in Sunday School.

“We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and thats not changing,” Cook declared.”We believe in the simple not the complex…We believe in saying no to thousands of products, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us,” he added.

“We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in ways other cannot…And I think that regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well,” he concluded.Its not what you sell its what you believe.”

…

“In a provocative and saucy book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, Spence explains the unique beliefs behind many of the one-of-a-kind organizations he has studied or worked with over the years, from BMW to Whole Foods Market to Southwest Airlines. Sure, these and other organizations are built around strong business models, stellar products and services, and (of course) clever advertising. But Spence is adamant that behind every great company is an authentic sense of purpose — “a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make in the world” — and a workplace with the “energy and vitality” to bring that purpose to life.”

via Its Not What You Sell, Its What You Believe – Bill Taylor – Harvard Business Review.
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This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company

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“In a big company, you never feel you’re fast enough.” Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of GE, is talking to me by phone from the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California, where she’s visiting entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She gets a charge out of the Valley, but her trips also remind her how perilous the business climate is right now. “Business-model innovation is constant in this economy,” she says. “You start with a vision of a platform. For a while, you think there’s a line of sight, and then it’s gone. There’s suddenly a new angle.”

Within GE, she says, “our traditional teams are too slow. We’re not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change.”

…

“The business community focuses on managing uncertainty,” says Dev Patnaik, cofounder and CEO of strategy firm Jump Associates, which has advised GE, Target, and PepsiCo, among others. “That’s actually a bit of a canard.” The true challenge lies elsewhere, he explains: “In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That’s something our current systems can’t handle.

“There’s a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve,” Patnaik continues. “Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They’re absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems–when you don’t know what you don’t know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

“Uncertainty is when you’ve defined the variable but don’t know its value. Like when you roll a die and you don’t know if it will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. But ambiguity is when you’re not even sure what the variables are. You don’t know how many dice are even being rolled or how many sides they have or which dice actually count for anything.” Businesses that focus on uncertainty, says Patnaik, “actually delude themselves into thinking that they have a handle on things. Ah, ambiguity; it can be such a bitch.”

…

“Technology forces disruption, and not all of the change will be good. Optimists look to all the excitement. Pessimists look to all that gets lost. They’re both right. How you react depends on what you have to gain versus what you have to lose.”

Yet while pessimists may be emotionally calmed by their fretting, it will not aid them practically. The pragmatic course is not to hide from the change, but to approach it head-on. Thurston offers this vision: “Imagine a future where people are resistant to stasis, where they’re used to speed. A world that slows down if there are fewer options–that’s old thinking and frustrating. Stimulus becomes the new normal.”

via This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company.

Reach for the Maturity Model NOT the Sky!

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Last week Facebook announced its plans for IPO and it certainly made me stop and think, would I invest my money in a company that has a socialist manifesto epitomized by “the Hacker Way”. Sure lots of people will make a lot of money, particularly Mr Sugar Mountain, but is a company with 85% of its revenue based on ads worth a multiple of 20? Surely the world has grown up in the last decade and we won’t repeat the dot.com excesses?

The smart money right now is on Facebook being a hugely successful business. But I see a number of things in Facebook that worry me. Although it’s a huge network, it’s a very simple, single model business. There’s lots of plans – they could move into search, or games, or transactions. But it’s all speculation about how to spend the IPO money. They are in fact a very small company – some 3000 employees, and, as I said, it’s a hackers paradise. They have the basics of a platform idea where they host apps, but this is mickey mouse compared to Amazon. Similarly their technology is simplistic compared to Google. And their security engineering is plain immature. And that’s where I think they are in general – incredibly immature. They may boast their youth is a strength, but my experience tells me they don’t have a business platform to grow their complexity to expand their business model in multiple directions. The social media space is nothing if not faddish; sentiment could turn on a dime (sixpence) and the hackers wouldn’t know where to turn. Nearly a billion users doesn’t represent maturity, it represents business opportunity that Facebook has not yet leveraged.

I don’t want to bash Facebook per se. Rather I want to demonstrate the importance of the maturity model. If I am advising a huge company I ask myself what represents maturity in this business model. A bank may have relatively small workforce, but have tremendous complexity in risk, compliance and so on. Their workforce is highly skilled and largely comprised of information workers who manage significant architectural complexity. Equally Amazon has become a hugely complex business but with a very simple portfolio of external, customer facing services. They have used architecture to expose business services for the end consumer and platform partners and have cleverly leveraged and extended their core business model off an architectural base.

So while Facebook looks around for ways to spend its IPO money, I will be looking to see how they leverage off their current maturity level. You can’t buy maturity, you have to build it yourself. You can buy more mature companies, but then you have to have the maturity to integrate them successfully. I note Facebook has acquired 10 companies to date, but they have all been “talent acquisitions”. In fact Zuckerberg is quoted as saying “”We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people..” When I hear the CEO saying “we bought Xxxxx for their SOA platform and expertise, I will maybe consider them a buy. Until then I will just watch.

IT-centrism, business-centrism and business-architecture

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This one continues the recent theme of IT-centrism and why it’s such a problem for enterprise-architecture, but extends it into a slightly different direction, courtesy of a Tweet yesterday by Ron Tolido: rtolido: interesting stuff coming soon around a global Business Architect certification standard by The Open Group #ogsfo Important to say here that I […]