Business analysts need to serve as the communications conduit between IT and the business side in SOA, said Theresa Lanowitz, an analyst with Voke Media Inc. Lanowitz released a report today on “The Role of the Business Analyst.” The potential rivalry and possible cooperation between business analysts and enterprise architects in SOA is the focus of Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. in a ZapTake released Wednesday.

The clash and possible reconciliation of traditional roles is the focus of Schmelzer’s ZapTake titled “The Business Analyst vs. the Enterprise Architect.” Despite the title, he concludes that they could all get along.

Both the business analyst and the enterprise architect play roles in developing requirements and then the architect “shepherds business requirements into services and then manages the realization of those services through the IT development organization,” Schmelzer writes.

This can lead to confusion as to whether the business analyst role is being eclipsed or is competing or even impeding the enterprise architect in SOA, the ZapThink analyst said. But he quickly adds that this is not necessarily the case.

“Even if we focus on the role of an IT business analyst, it is clear that the scope of the work and nature of their skills differ in significant ways,” Schmelzer writes.

The enterprise architect role is “to translate business requirements into capabilities that can be cost-effectively implemented, predictably managed, and reliably controlled,” Schmelzer said. The business analyst focuses-in on requirements generation and the communications conduit role, which Lanowitz highlights.

Enterprises should consider structuring the business analyst and enterprise architect roles holistically, in Schmelzer’s view.

Bringing business analysts and enterprise architects into a closer working relationship would take advantage of their different skill sets, he argues, pointing out that business analysts “often lack the technical skills to do the modeling part that is so necessary to making good architecture work.” So the architect would have a primary role in modeling, for example.

Also the focus of the two roles is different. Business analysts tend to focus on “discrete business needs to be addressed in short timeframes,” Schmelzer writes. But to achieve the SOA “goals of reuse, reduction of redundancy, and business agility,” the enterprise architect needs to look strategically at the big picture.

Read more at: SearchSOA