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: Business architect is too often a missing link that needs to emerge. Some 35% of organisations have not established the business architect role (level 1), 33% have developed some business architecture guidelines but do not use them across the organisation (level 2), and 20% have defined a consistent architecture framework for business processes (level 3). But only 6% of organisations use this framework to fuel the organisation's portfolio of business services for prioritising business process change investments (level 4); a further 6% see business architecture as a strategic capability for decision-making (level 5). Management practices around the business architect position are a work in progress. Many of the respondents to our survey also reported fairly low maturity levels on the governance and lifecycle management practices critical to business architecture. For example, with respect to governance, only 19% of respondents confirmed that their organisations have set up cross-functional leadership teams, where business architects typically operate (level 3). Moreover, when asked about end-to-end process management, 46% of respondents said that their corporate initiatives for process and information insights pursue different objectives and are executed without coordination (level 2). So where to begin? In our research, we found two established views of how organisations can charter and then fill the business architect position: