This role is responsible for enterprise level architectures, being involved in all the significant decisions regarding structure, behavior, interfaces, constraints and trade-offs at the enterprise level.
The enterprise architect has overall responsibility for IT architecture at the enterprise level. This includes
identifying and documenting the architecturally significant aspects of the enterprise under the scope of the
enterprise architecture exercise.
The rationale for the main architecture decisions involves finding the right balance between competing factors,
including the concerns of various stakeholders, risks, costs, constraints and technologies. The models developed and
decisions made need be agreed upon, validated and communicated to all the interested parties at the enterprise
level.
A person acting in this role must be a good facilitator and have excellent communication skills. The IT
architect also needs to have the ability to comprehend and makes sense of a large body of knowledge (i.e. IT
technologies and the business) and create the IT architecture models that capture this
information. Excellent knowledge of the business of the enterprise is therefore essential, along with an extensive
knowledge of IT technologies. The enterprise architect needs to be familiar with the tools used to capture the models
of the architecture and with the main technological aspects of potential solutions.
An enterprise architect should be prepared to:
Assess the current situation of the enterprise (technically and otherwise);
Understand the enterprise's requirements, strategies and goals;
Facilitate modeling of the target enterprise architecture;
Discuss and facilitate a business re-engineering effort, if needed;
Understand the technical sides of the solutions;
Take part in defining IT architectures and solution approaches for resulting systems.
Assignment Approaches
Depending upon the size and scope of the enterprise, consider assigning the Enterprise Architect, and Domain or
Business Line Architect roles to the same person. However, in large organization with large business domains or
business lines, separate IT architects will be required.
