Why is it important to have an Enterprise Architect ?

Every business is made up of various parts, such as processes, products, data, people, technologies, and many more. Needless to say, these parts must work together in synergies to create and deliver value to customers so that the business can be profitable. The rapid change in the nature of how modern customers evaluate an enterprise and product is a challenge to meet for many legacy companies. In todays time of Industrial Revolution 4.0, enterprises are not only selling products but also the services. Thats where a Digital Enterprise Architect (EA) could help the organization understand how business, product and customer could fit together in this virtually & socially connected market. EA plays an essential role in realizing the connected services in alignment with organizational goals and company culture.

In many legacy companies, the IT landscape becomes heavily complex and often over engineered, because of old systems not able to adapt to the new or change in business requirements. This leads to the dirty work arounds resulting in ever increasing technical debt which at certain stage becomes too expansive to maintain. The environment in which businesses operate is complex, and EA helps simplify this complexity. It focuses on understanding how business and technology work together because business models change and technology is advancing rapidly. For an EA, there are four domains to focus :

1. Business process architecture: This domain captures how a business operates, including its processes, capabilities, and information. It also models roles, responsibilities, metrics, products, projects, and more. By modeling the business, we can determine how IT supports it today. Designing and using the right software is not easy, and EA can help ensure that software aligns with business needs.
2. Application architecture: This domain defines the software solutions that help businesses do their job and adapt to change. Applications need data to work, and with the complexity of enterprise data, we need a better way to manage and use it.
3. Data architecture: This domain models the sources, formats, management, and quality of data. From customer data to transactional data, comapnies are dealing with endless amount of information, which needs to be analyzed, monitored and at the sametime consider the data privacy principles.
4. Technology architecture: This domain describes the underlying infrastructure needed to run business applications. IT needs to ensure that technology aligns with business needs to achieve its goals, from operational to functional level.

EAs are usually part of IT Team, but work across functional business departments or demand management center. The business expresses its objectives which could be centeric to the vertical need of the company for ex. marketing, or customer aquisition, or after sales, but an EA answers with how they will achieve them keeping the IT landscape lean and sustainable, and also EA along with IT is responsible to make sure that the infra is capable to meet any new change in future.

I hope I have made some concrete points for you to determine if your company needs an EA or not along with your business stakeholders. In next posts, I will point out some common problems that usually most of the legacy industry faces and how an EA could help to find solutions to those challenges.

Cheers.