Business Architecture Layer Roles

This week’s topic is very relevant to my career, as I function to some extent across two distinct roles that exist in business and IT, as well as EA—that of a Solution Architect and as a Business Consultant.  I was intrigued to see an article discussing the job description of a Business Process Architect.  It seems that this title is specific to EA, but much of what I read sounds very similar to job functions I am familiar with.  To try and correlate these roles, I will attempt to define their job descriptions and responsibilities.  First, the roles I am familiar with:

Solution Architect: The role of the Solution Architect is to understand the customer’s business issues/drivers, business processes and requirements, and define an integrated solution enabling the customer to fulfill his strategy. The Solution Architect is responsible for analyzing and translating business information and technical requirements into the architecture and design of the solution and describing it through architecture and design deliverables. This individual is a key customer partner during the entire lifecycle of the project. The Solution Architect is autonomous in leading the overall functional aspects of a project. This individual is accountable for the final workability and relevancy of the solution delivered.

Within an organization, the Solution Architect is responsible for the capitalization of the know-how of his field of expertise and supports and/leads the lessons learned/after action review activities.

Business Consultant: The Business Consultant is a specialist participating in transformational projects, organizing, structuring and working on the alignment of corporate business processes. They are responsible for capturing and defining business needs and requirements. The Business Consultant organizes and leads workshops with the business stakeholders to document the business processes as well as the related business rules providing valuable information to build the landscape of the expected solution and measure the overall impact of the transformation on the business strategy.

The Business Consultant’s experience of the industries, business processes and rules, allows the individual to understand the business issues; and thus have the ability to support the propositions of transformational plans and solutions.

And now, the BPA role definition, according to Gartner:

Business Process Architect: The Business Process Architect role is responsible for single business process management or business process improvement project and cross-project activities. Across projects, they contribute to developing relevant process architecture guiding principles, maintaining the current-state business process documentation (and repository) and developing target future-state business process architecture at a high level (including business process hierarchies and business capability models).  During projects, the architect may lead the modeling work, but must also leverage the complete enterprise architecture (EA) in advising the process improvement work for the specific business need targeted by the project, thus ensuring greater synergy with enterprise business strategy.

I found the following to be particularly interesting…

This combination of enterprise-broad, and yet project-specific, deep business process improvement abilities make this role demanding, with a combination of skills needed that can be difficult to find in a single individual — and thus organizations may separate these into different jobs as needed. Since this is a role, but not necessarily a full-time job, this work could well be done by an existing member of the enterprise architecture team, and in this case, it is likely then titled “Business Architect” (BA).

So, then a BPA and a BA are the same thing?  What then is the difference between a BA and a Business Consultant, as I have defined?  It seems very little.  Perhaps if anything, a BA actually performs modeling work while a BC focuses on gathering information and providing advice.  But this seems very subjective.  Unfortunately, I am left with more questions than answers, but it is definitely something I plan to keep learning about, especially since I run a business that needs to properly distinguish and articulate our competencies in the market.