Featured in this week’s spotlight is Tanisha Fitts, General Manager of T. Rowe Price.
Tanisha Fitts has worked in the Financial Services Industry for over 17 years and has held a variety of roles leading and executing change within the distribution and operations side of the business.
In a previous role, she was responsible for helping to stand up and manage a business architecture practice at her firm. Tanisha is a certified practitioner and is actively engaged in contributing to international business architecture networks.
As a General Manager at T. Rowe Price, she is focused on helping to define and implement strategy while ensuring operational execution across a rapidly evolving organization. We reached out to Tanisha to get her perspective as an architect, and her thoughts on several key questions.
Question: How did you get your start in the industry?
Answer: My start in business architecture began in 2019 when I was selected to join a small team to stand up a business architecture practice in our Global Distribution organization. The team was established under the value proposition of driving capability ownership. There was a desire to create greater discipline and more direct accountability for our business capabilities, which would enable us to more efficiently and effectively manage our growing complexity as a Global Distribution organization.
We spent the first year building our business architecture practice, educating our stakeholders, and establishing core accountabilities and responsibilities across all of our business capabilities. The remaining three years were focused on using business architecture to help translate direction and build frameworks for analysis and decision-making.
In 2023 I transitioned into a new role as General Manager helping to support our new Head of Global Sales Management in standing up this new function within our Global Distribution organization. I am excited to carry forward all of the learnings and tools from my business architecture background and experience into this role.
Q: What is your current responsibility and what is your typical day like?
A: My role is focused on developing and managing our strategic plan, budgets, communications, and overseeing the day-to-day business operations of our department.
A typical day can vary but often can include many meetings with stakeholders on a number of key bodies of work our department is influencing and/or leading in executing against our strategy to facilitating key presentations and/or holding budget and communications calls with our team and key business partners.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: First, we all know it takes an ecosystem of teams to translate strategy into action. I enjoy helping to connect the dots across teams, ideas, and initiatives and bringing people together to work collaboratively to achieve our business outcomes.
Secondly, I’m a change advocate and recognize that change is necessary to continue to grow and evolve. I enjoy being in a role that allows me the opportunity to help shape and drive change across our organization.
Lastly, I consider myself a lifelong learner and I enjoy designing new things. Given I am working in a new function within our organization, I’m excited to help co-create the design or should I say “architect” our new organization with our Head of Global Sales Management and our team.
Q: What trends in architecture are you looking out for the rest of 2023 and 2024?
A: The business architecture guild community is always a wealth of knowledge for me in staying on top of key trends. I’m always keeping an eye out for questions that are top of mind from our members and the latest webinars that share examples of how to leverage business architecture for various business scenarios.
One key item I’m always looking to learn more about is the latest tools to help automate the knowledgebase.
Q: What is one thing we can do to support or increase the women in architecture?
A: I believe women in Architecture can have many career titles that don’t necessarily involve the word “architecture”. At our core, we are all change agents for a better way of working to drive business outcomes, and that can hold many career titles across many different industries. The more we can share that message and show how the dots connect between business architecture and other disciplines and the value it brings to organizations, we have the opportunity to influence other women to become a part of this wonderful community.