Become a Certified Business Architect®

Showing up is 80% of life.

— Woody Allen

Thematix is building on its considerable experience developing and teaching business architecture to offer an online and in-person course of instruction designed to teach business people, both technical and non-technical, what they need to know to become a “Certified Business Architect®”.¹ The online course, described in greater detail here, is unique in that it combines a self-paced, conceptually-oriented learning environment with a live, skills-oriented workshop, enabling the student to apply what he or she has learned to example scenarios taught in real time.  This hybrid approach to online learning has become a central imperative for a quality online education, providing what John Dewey called “experiential learning,” which combined a learn-by-doing approach with problem solving.  Modern educators in the vanguard of online learning call this “active learning”:

Introducing diverse communication tools is central to what we refer to as active learning, a digital instruction approach that balances synchronous and asynchronous communication, while preserving online learning flexibility.  (Ubell, Robert (2016-12-16). Going Online: Perspectives on Digital Learning (Kindle Locations 614-615). Taylor and Francis.)

Business architecture lends itself well to this hybrid approach.  Although it does require an intellectual grasp and even memorization of some core principles, the whole purpose of business architecture is a practical one: to enable businesses to fix and transform themselves in a systematic way, from the top down and bottom up.  Thematix has therefore adopted an online workshop, or practicum, designed to explore the application of concepts and principles to factual scenarios.   Practice not only makes perfect; it enhances understanding and better prepares a student for the exam (and for real life). Whereas other business architecture courses — and certainly BIZBOK® Guide itself — are entirely linear, moving from subject to subject in a straight start-to-finish fashion, Thematix recognizes that the essential power of business architecture lies in the interrelatedness of its concepts — the cross-mappings made between business value streams, capabilities, information and organizational entities that tell the story of the business.  Thematix explicitly teaches these cross-mappings, which enable the practitioner to interleave business knowledge on the fly, and to know how to “run” one of the emerging business architecture tools. Business architecture excels in its ability to say what the organizational or technological implications of a given strategy are. Both business understanding and business decision-making require this holistic combination of views on the “body” of the running business. Jim Rhyne and Robert Kost, Thematix partners, BA practitioners and Certified Business Architects themselves, are well-equipped to provide this education.  Jim, an “IBM-er” with a background in Artificial Intelligence, is a Business Architecture Guild founder and is currently actively involved in getting a business architecture meta-model sanctioned by the Object Management Group.  Jim taught computer science and linguistics at the University of Houston, and was adjunct professor at Santa Clara University.  Rob, a lawyer with a background in philosophy and serial entrepreneurialism, taught business systems theory as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, while building his own digital businesses in professional services and online travel. ¹ Business architecture received its first full and systematic expression in A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK® Guide), published by the Business Architecture Guild®. It is the Guild that provides certification and testing to its members, entitling them a “CBA®”. Becoming a member of the Guild is simple and relatively inexpensive.