What Does an Enterprise Architect Do ?

Business Technology Strategy

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

• Your organization’s business and technology strategy and rationale
• Your competition (products, strategies and Processes)
• Your company’s business practices
• Your Technology Portfolio

• Influence business strategy
• Translate business strategy into technical vision and strategy
• Understand customer and market trends
• Capture customer, organizational and business requirements of architecture
• Prepare architectural documents and presentations

• Visionary
• Entrepreneurial

Organizational Politics

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

• Who the key players are in the organization
• What they want, both business and personal

• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
• Listen, network and influence
• Sell the Vision, keep the vision alive
• Take and retake the pulse of all critical influencers of the architecture project

• Able to see from and sell to multiple viewpoints
• Confident and articulate
• Ambitious and driven
• Patient and not
• Resilient
• Sensitive to where the power is and how it flows in your organization

Consulting

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

• Elicitation techniques
• Consulting frameworks
• Soft Skill techniques

• Build “trusted advisor” relationships
• Understand what the business people want and need from the architecture
• Understand what the developers want and need from the  architecture
• Help developers see the value of the enterprise architecture and understand how to use the technology successfully

• Committed to others’ success
• Empathetic and approachable
• An effective change agent and process savvy
• A good mentor and teacher

Leadership

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

• Yourself

• Set team context and vision
• Make decisions stickp>
• Build teams
• Motivate

• You and others see you as a leader
• Charismatic and credible
• You believe it can an should be done and that you can lead the effort
• Committed, dedicated, passionate
• You see the entire effort in a broader business and personal context

Technology

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are

• In-depth understanding of the domain and pertinent technologies
• Understand what technical issues are key to success
• Development of methods and modeling techniques

• Modeling
• Trade-off Analysis
• Prototype, Experiment, and Simulate
• Prepare architectural documents and presentations
• Technology trend analysis/roadmaps<
• Take a systems viewpoint

• Creative
• Investigative, Practical, Pragmatic, and Insightful
• Tolerant of ambiguity, willing to backtrack, seek multiple solutions
• Good a working at an abstract level

Risks and Rewards

Risks

Rewards

• Responsibility without corresponding control
• A lot of resistance and disappointments along the way
• Often encounter others that believe they have a better idea or solution

• Focus on interesting and complex issues
• Opportunity to advance to very high levels in the organization with business and technical focus (rather than personal and fiscal)
• Opportunity to make an enormous difference to the company and clients