Isn't Business Architect a Senior Business Analyst?

A friend of mine asked me this question while watching Raptors game this week, "Isn't Business Architect a Senior Business Analyst?". Here I am trying to answer this question.

Business Architect role is relatively new as compared to Business Analysts in most of the organizations. The roles have similarities in terms of working with Business and applying similar techniques to understand business needs but there are few differences. While developing Business Architecture capability in an organization it is important to clarify these roles and the difference between them to avoid any confusion . The difference between the roles becomes evident by reviewing the role definitions.

The role definition for a Business Analyst as per the International Institute of Business Analysis is,
" A business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze,communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. The business analyst understands business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals."

As per The Open Group, the Business Architecture is ,
"The business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes information, as well as the interaction between these concepts". The Business Architect is the custodian and driver of the Business Architecture.

Other than the salary difference, following are some of the differences in these roles,

Knowledge

• Business Analyst focus is usually a particular business problem in a bigger business domain. Understanding of the business domain is helpful to identify the solution but could be dealt with the help of a Business SME. A complete knowledge of the business goals, strategies is usually not needed.
• A broad knowledge of the business Vision, Strategy and Goals, is a must for a good Business Architect. Business strategy defines the what part of the business goals and the Business Architecture defines how to achieve it.

Role Scope

• Generally a Business Analyst is engaged on a project level scope capturing business requirements and working with the Business stakeholder, Solution Architects, Developers and Project Managers. The requirements are constrained by the project scope, solution provided, and implementation during the project life cycle.
• A Business Architect is engaged at the enterprise level scope defining Business Strategies, Processes, Modeling, Capabilities and Services with Business stakeholders. These activities are planning in nature and are not constrained by the implementation of a particular project.

Following picture depicts the roles in the lifecycle of the project using Nick's "span of responsibility" triangles.

Deliverable

• A Business Architect engages Business subject matter expert, brainstorms, analyze, validate, manage and communicate business requirements . The end product is usually requirements, use cases documents articulating the business requirements and rules.
• A Business Architect works with Business and provide artifacts like Business Strategy, Road maps, Business Processes, Business Process Models, Business Service Descriptions etc.

The conclusion is that although these roles have similarities in terms of working with the Business but the scope is quite different. One BA (Business Analyst) focus is tactical and other BA (Business Architect) focus is strategic. Business Architect role seems to be a natural career progression for a Business Analyst and usually is not the other way around.