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

Source: IFEAD

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