Who Is This Enterprise Architect

Excerpts

They must regularly justify their worth and function within the organization, constantly promoting the value of their role to the business. With limited budget and often less authority, today's enterprise architects must serve as the all-knowing sages to CIOs and CTOs, advising them on the best course of action to create efficiency through deployment of applications and technology while protecting the bottom line of today and tomorrow.

These organizations are readily recognizing enterprise architects as crucial to the rationalization process as these individuals have the skills to analyze current requirements while considering future issues. Enterprise architects can evaluate capabilities, capacities, and orchestrate the intertwining of all the various assorted application, data, and informational architectures that exist in the enterprise. Their role is critical to maintaining an organization that is software lean, functionally strong, and operationally agile.

...the role requires a leader, and it also calls for equal parts visionary, evangelist, strategist, devil's advocate, and consultant. These characteristics are crucial for an architect to affect change, articulate and sell a vision, conceptualize a solution, evaluate approaches, and provide strategic advice to those implementing a solution.

Visionary: ...enterprise architects must be able to articulate their vision to effectively inform and demonstrate support for the organization's primary business objectives.

Evangelist: ...must express their architectural vision across numerous internal and external stakeholders. This role calls for tolerance of ambiguity in requirements and translatory skills to be able to convert business objectives to technical strategy that will guide IT to solutions.

Strategist: It is in this area that the lines are often blurred between development management and architecture. Problems for enterprise architects, however, are less defined usually and often unstructured. They are more focused on the ramifications of changing or introducing new code into the overall ecosystem and how it will affect the business stakeholders.

Devil's Advocate: There are times when adding an application or functionality is simply not in the best interest of the organization. Enterprise architects must weigh the value of the functionality against the impact of the change to the application ecosystem, resources at hand, and future of the technology landscape. Architecting a good solution and architecting the right solution for the organization may not be the same thing.

Trusted Advisor: The real value in the role enterprise architects can play are as consultants during the planning stage.

...software dependency mapping and impact analysis...