Title: The business architect role is vital to business process transformation
Headings: The business architect role is vital to business process transformation
The business architect role is vital to business process transformation
If you have not yet heard the term "business architect", you soon will, write John Rymer and Alexander Peters of Forrester Research. Whether business architects report into the business or IT, this emerging role will help usher in organisations' transition from IT to business technology (BT).
Recognising the need for a business architect
Independent role for business architects
Previous Forrester articles in the series:

Content: A new organisation unifying process and project experts. The Business Architects Association (BAA) advocates placing a senior internal consultant with strong industry experience in the role of business architect, arguing that it is usually easier for businesspeople to learn technology than it is for technology experts to learn the business. A new career path for enterprise architects. Business architecture is also an emerging discipline and aspirational position within enterprise architecture (EA) practices and the teams that run them. Alignment within the organisation, bringing together business strategy and capabilities to drive results and/or transformation, is key to this approach. Both the BAA model and the EA discipline approaches, however, have the limitation of usually being consultative in nature, unless the business architect reports into a process improvement organisation. We do see a third way to fill the need for a business architect: Charter the position as a management or executive function accountable to the senior business process executive for getting things done, rather than just advising others on what to do. Independent role for business architects
So where should the business architect executive fit into the organisation? Our research suggests that many organisations try to leave their existing organisational structures in place without giving their business architects a strong independent role.