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ZDNET's key takeaways

• At Siemens, the emphasis is on human guidance of AI.
• Business architect is an up-and-coming role in today's AI world.
• Firms need professionals who can manage sprawling agent networks.

Business architects, who blend technology expertise with business acumen, are emerging as the ideal professionals to lead organizations through the complex world of AI. Along with hybrid business and tech skills, professionals seeking to advance in today's and tomorrow's economy need to demonstrate "a tenacious spirit and a tenacious personality." 

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That's the advice from a senior executive at one of the world's leading technology infrastructure organizations, who says that IT implementations are no longer once-and-done operations. "There's a lot of trial and error in new technology," said Andrew Allan, senior vice president of financial operations for the CIO's office at Siemens. "What do you want it to do? How do you want to embrace it?" Yet, at the same time, Allan said he does not see AI replacing technology professionals' skills anytime soon at his company.

Solving business challenges

ZDNET spoke with Allan at the recent Salesforce AgentForce event in New York, where he discussed steering the organization with more than 250,000 employees globally on a new course in an increasingly AI-saturated world.   

Combined technology and business skills are in high demand at Siemens, a sprawling conglomerate that produces and sells digital and automation solutions to a range of heavy industries. The company seeks business architects and like-minded professionals "who have deep knowledge of the complexities of the business, and the problems we're trying to solve, and be able to translate that back to a technological solution," said Allan.

"When you start looking at what agents can do, you need people who can translate and decipher that," he said. "It also means before you break ground, you need a good idea of what you're doing, you need user stories, ethics, ROI, and the business case." 

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Allan recognized that adding agents across the organization means greater complexity, which requires management skills: "You have to figure out what you want -- what's your north star? What do you want the technology to do? What's the business problem you're trying to solve? If you can ground your use cases in a business opportunity or business problem, that really helps you in how you apply the technology."

He said business architects require a degree of experience: "Normally, a minimum of 10 years of planning and analysis experience is expected," according to industry experts. "In addition to some systems background, the business architect will possess a broad background in different business sectors, with in-depth experience and knowledge in at least one aspect of the business -- for example, engineering, manufacturing, planning, etc."  

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The role of a business architect differs from that of an enterprise architect, Allan explained. An enterprise architect considers applications and infrastructure for a technology roadmap, while a business architect speaks with R&D segments, the chief revenue officer, and pricing and packaging specialists. 

"They ask, 'Okay, what are the capabilities that you guys are looking for? What are our go-to market strategies? What are our products?' They bring it back in to say, 'Okay, this is the direction that the business wants to go in, how does that match up with our architectural roadmap? Are there complementary areas? Are there areas we're going to have to reason over?'"    

New skills for new demands

Siemens recently embarked on what it calls a "One Tech Company" strategy, seeking to blend digital and real-world technologies in an approach that integrates software, hardware, AI, and digital twins, both for its internal operations and for customers. It's a way to "strap a jetpack on what we're doing and really accelerate the growth that we seek," said Allan. 

He said he does not see AI consuming technology jobs across his company: "I'm old enough to remember when the internet was going to put libraries out of business, or the Y2K bug, or blockchain, or the next shiny thing."

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At the same time, he cautioned that "AI could prove to be quite a challenge in areas where you have a high-touch horizontal." That process would involve identifying "low-hanging fruit where you could be automating tasks that are very repetitive in nature," Allan said. Examples of areas ripe for what he calls "agentification" include operational tasks, such as validating sales leads or extracting metrics from systems. 

The good news is that business architects and like-minded roles elevate human skills. At Siemens, he said the emphasis is on encouraging professionals to develop "deep domain knowledge from a vertical perspective. AI can really enhance what we do."

Such professionals help enable and oversee a range of vertical processes, including product design, development, deployment, production, and manufacturing. Allan said new technologies "free up our staff from the mundane repetitive tasks, so we can start looking at higher-value tasks for jobs of the future. We need business architects who can better understand where the business is driving."  

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Also in great demand are professionals who can oversee user acceptance testing (UAT) -- especially as AI agents speed up software deployments, Allan said. Skills for delivering change management are also in demand, as well as "having people who understand the psychology of change. They can answer the questions, 'What's in it for me, what's in it for my organization?'"

He suggested our current times can be viewed as "never normal," in which "technology is outstripping organizational design and organizational structure. Some of the biggest challenges right now for organizations are that technology can do anything you want it to do." 

Allan concluded: "The question is, from a human perspective, what you want it to do? And then how do you actually scale up your workforce to take advantage of it? My fear with some technology is that it's used to repave existing cart paths, rather than build a brand-new highway that's going to take you to somewhere that you've never been before."