Organization

The Business Architect reports into business management and works closely with a counterpart in IT to align technical solutions with business needs. The Business Architect may have supervisory responsibility, possibly acting as coach and mentor to junior members of the Business Architecture Center of Excellence. In addition, the Business Architect works though others at every level of the organization soliciting strategic imperatives from senior leaders and executives, and supporting business unit managers as they leverage business architecture artifacts to create their business plans. Finally, the Business Architect may provide direct input into the governance cycle that supports the achievement of key goals, planning and execution of various business scenarios, and delivery of bottom line business value.

Responsibilities
Develop a business architecture strategy based on a situational awareness of various business scenarios and motivations.
Apply a structured business architecture approach and methodology for capturing the key views of the enterprise.
Capture the tactical and strategic enterprise goals that provide traceability through the organization and are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing governance.
Describe the primary business functions of the enterprise and distinguish between customer-facing, supplier-related, business execution and business management functions.
Define the set of strategic, core and support processes that transcend functional and organizational boundaries; identify and describe external entities such as customers, suppliers, and external systems that interact with the business; and describe which people, resources and controls are involved in the processes.
Define the data shared across the enterprise and the relationships between those data.
Capture the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units.
Skills and Qualifications
A broad, enterprise-wide view of the business and varying degrees of appreciation for strategy, processes and capabilities, enabling technologies, and governance
The ability to recognize structural issues within the organization, functional interdependencies and cross-silo redundancies
The ability to apply architectural principles to business solutions
The ability to assimilate and correlate disconnected documentation and drawings, and articulate their collective relevance to the organization and to high-priority business issues
Experience using model-based representations that can be adjusted as required to collect, aggregate or disaggregate complex and conflicting information about the business
The ability to visualize and create high-level models that can be used in future analysis to extend and mature the business architecture
Extensive experience planning and deploying both business and IT initiatives
Experience modeling business processes using a variety of tools and techniques
Exceptional communication skills and the ability to communicate appropriately at all levels of the organization; this includes written and verbal communications as well as visualizations
The ability to act as liaison conveying information needs of the business to IT and data constraints to the business; applies equal conveyance regarding business strategy and IT strategy, business processes and work flow automation, business initiatives and IT initiatives, and benefit realization and service delivery
Team player able to work effectively at all levels of an organization with the ability to influence others to move toward consensus
Strong situational analysis and decision making abilities
Conclusion
There you have it – my attempt at a job description for the Business Architect. Please feel free to use it as a starting point; I encourage you to work with your Resource Manager and adapt it to fit your organization. As always, comments are welcome.