How today’s enterprise architect juggles strategy, tech and innovation

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the role of the enterprise architect has become more crucial than ever, beyond the usual “bridge between business and IT.” In a world where business, strategy and technology must be tightly interconnected, the enterprise architect must take on multiple personas to address a wide range of concerns. These include everything from technical design to ecosystem management and navigating emerging technology trends like AI.

A multi-persona approach

An enterprise architect is much more than a designer, their role is multifaceted taking on many personas (to name but a few!):

• Trusted advisor: While enterprise architects can often be seen as the catalysts for technology they must provide credible guidance to business leadership, offering insights into technology trends, risks and opportunities and avoid repeating mistakes of the past. They ensure that decisions are aligned with both short-term goals and long-term sustainability
• Strategist: The enterprise architect aligns technology initiatives with the business’s vision, ensuring that technology choices drive value and competitive advantage.
• Innovator/experimenter: enterprise architects look for new innovative opportunities to bring into the business and know how to frame and execute experiments to maximize the learnings.
• Navigator: As technology landscapes and market dynamics change, enterprise architects help businesses navigate through complexity and uncertainty, ensuring that the organization remains on course despite evolving challenges.
• Designer: Enterprise architects craft solutions that balance business needs with technology capabilities, given constraints and often with trade-offs.
• Jenga builder: Enterprise architects piece together both reusable and replaceable components and solutions enabling responsive (adaptable, resilient) architectures that accelerate time-to-market without disrupting other components or the architecture overall (e.g. compromising quality, structure, integrity, goals). There are trade-offs of consistency and maintainability versus agility that need to be carefully decided upon.
• Observer-optimiser: Continuous monitoring, review and refinement is essential. enterprise architects ensure systems are performing at their best, with mechanisms (e.g. tagging, component/application mapping, key metric collection) and tools incorporated to ensure data can be reported on sufficiently and efficiently — without creating an industry in itself! — to identify opportunities for optimizations that reduce cost, improve efficiency and ensure scalability. With hybrid on-prem and cloud-deployed solutions and differences of capability and alignment between organizations and their suppliers, this can be a real challenge!
• Collaborator: Enterprise architects work with business stakeholders, development teams, vendors and other key players to ensure business outcomes are being met. They encourage seamless communication and collaboration across all levels of the organization and in some cases playing mediator.
• Ecosystem warrior: Enterprise architects manage the larger ecosystem, addressing challenges like sustainability, vendor management, compliance and risk mitigation. They ensure that all systems and components, wherever they are and who owns them, work together harmoniously.

Next, I want to delve into a couple of areas that demonstrate the depth and breadth of the demands of an enterprise architect.

The enterprise architect’s wide range of concerns

An enterprise architect’s work extends beyond just designing systems; it involves addressing various concerns and trade-offs that span the IT landscape, technology stack, business objectives and operational needs. These concerns include:

• Enterprise/portfolio architecture: Planning and managing the holistic view of the complex landscape of solutions across an enterprise and within domains/portfolios. ensuring it is aligned with the business plans and organizational capabilities and addresses the challenges of complex ecosystems.
• Solution architecture: Crafting an enterprise architecture that meets both technical and business requirements. The solution must support current needs while being adaptable to future demands. Leveraging cloud solutions that drive simplification and standardization in business processes and technology investment where appropriate.
• Software architecture: Designing applications and services that integrate seamlessly with other systems, ensuring they are scalable, maintainable and secure and leveraging the established and emerging patterns, libraries and languages.
• Infrastructure architecture: Building the foundational layers of hardware, networking and cloud resources that support the entire technology ecosystem.
• Data architecture: Ensuring data governance, security, a connected data model and seamless flow between systems and supporting analytics and AI drive business insights and efficiencies.

Cross-cutting perspectives

The enterprise architect must also address and trade-off on:

• Performance: Ensuring that systems perform efficiently and meet business expectations.
• Security: Protecting sensitive data and systems from internal and external threats, compliance with standards such as ISO 27001, SOC2 and regulations such as the EU Cyber Security directive NIS2.
• Data protection and privacy: Ensuring compliance with data regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
• Resilience and availability: Designing systems that are fault-tolerant and available in line with requirements and SLAs.
• Cost and efficiency: Managing the total cost of ownership (TCO) while maximizing return on investment. With the availability of “on-demand cloud compute” it’s imperative that drivers of costs can be tracked and managed.
• User experience and accessibility: Designing intuitive systems that are easy to use and accessible/responsive for all, across all endpoints.
• Automation: Maximizing tools and practices in the delivery environments like IAC, CICD, DevOps, SecOps and Test Automation aligned with the technology and cloud provider stacks and enable sustainable agile delivery.
• Open source: This is an expanding offering in the industry and enterprise architecture stack beyond software, with huge potential.
• Bridging execution to strategy:
  • Enterprise architects must ensure the IT services necessary to deliver on strategic goals and the proposed architecture are all aligned.
  • What is the target state and roadmap to deliver these services considering key skills and capabilities, tools, standards, practices, ways of working, organizational structure, IT leadership and management.
  • How can enterprise architecture be an enabler to key evolving disciplines in IT, e.g. development/engineering?

Challenges of managing complex ecosystems

In today’s systems landscapes of on-premise, cloud solutions and hybrid models, enterprise architects (I like to call us “ecosystem warriors”) must manage complex ecosystems that involve a range of stakeholders, technologies and external partners. These challenges include (depending on the level/scope of architecture responsibility in the organization):

• Technology and business sustainability: Enterprise architects must manage the health status of technology ensuring that technology solutions continue to meet SLAs, are secure, sustainable, avoid technical debt and can evolve as business needs change. This requires long-term thinking and investment.
• Distributed responsibility ownership model: Responsibility for technology solutions may not be clear and spread across multiple teams, departments and organisations. enterprise architects must create systems that enable distributed ownership while maintaining coherence and alignment of the solutions and the end to end nature of the value chain they serve.
• Contracts, SLAs and supplier management: Managing vendor relationships, ensuring clear terms for service levels and mitigating risks associated with external suppliers are critical. enterprise architects need to balance innovation with the practical realities of contracts and service agreements. They must ensure any gaps are identified and addressed accordingly.
• Aggregated TCO: Evaluating the total cost across hardware, software, services and operational expenditures is key. enterprise architects help ensure that technology investments are optimized to deliver value without exceeding budget capex and opex constraints.
• Prioritization and planning: Enterprise architects must balance competing demands and prioritise initiatives that offer the most value. Strategic planning and demand/supply management is crucial to aligning resources with business goals and the enterprise architect has key input to this.
• Change management (technology and business): As technology evolves and landscapes become more complex and interconnected enterprise architects must manage transitions and ensure smooth adoption of new systems and changes. Technology can stretch deep into the business (including IT!) and enterprise architects need to be cognizant of the persona impact, any organizational shifts, training, disruption (particularly when urgent changes like vulnerability patches cause conflicts) and the pace of change that businesses are capable of absorbing.
• Pace of delivery and releases: Enterprise architects must find the balance between speed and quality. While businesses demand rapid releases (particularly for B2C channels), enterprise architects ensure that solutions are robust, secure and scalable.
• Fragmented customer experience: Ensuring that customers experience a seamless and integrated service across multiple touchpoints requires careful enterprise architecture to avoid siloed systems and fragmented user journeys.
• Compliance management: Enterprise architects are responsible for ensuring that systems comply with internal requirements, industry regulations, security standards and data protection laws. This requires close attention to the detail, auditing/testing, planning and designing upfront.
• Risk management: Enterprise architects must address data, security and operational risks, ensuring that technologies and systems are secure, resilient and compliant with regulatory requirements and at a level appropriate to the risk appetite of the organization.

Navigating emerging trends: AI and beyond

ImageIn addition to the complexity of managing ecosystems, enterprise architects face the challenge of navigating emerging technologies like AI, machine learning and automation. These technologies introduce both opportunities and challenges and enterprise architects must carefully evaluate how they fit into the broader technology strategy, cognisant of where these technologies are in the maturity cycle and make incremental gains (learning, value).

As AI continues to reshape industries, enterprise architects must balance innovation with caution. They need to ensure that AI systems are scalable, secure and aligned with business goals. They must also address risks and challenges related to organisational readiness, data privacy, security, ethical concerns and regulatory changes as they evolve.

The pace of technological change means enterprise architects must keep an eye on emerging trends without losing sight of long-term strategic goals. enterprise architects must balance the urgency of adopting new technologies with the need for stability, scalability and sustainability.

Enterprise architecture excellence

Enterprise architects should always strive towards architecture excellence with the objectives of:

• Aligning technology strategy with business strategy, OKRs, capabilities and priorities: Ensuring that technology decisions support business objectives and drive measurable outcomes. They collaborate with their business stakeholders/partners to define and deliver a credible business case.
• Razor-sharp execution: Delivering value frequently, ensuring solutions align with the business case and contribute to overall success.
• Credible and professional: Consistently performing across all enterprise architectural personas, adhering to industry best practices, behaving with integrity, transparency and respect and in line with both the organization’s and the industry professional body’s code of conduct.
• Navigating technology and innovation at pace: Making informed decisions on technology, suppliers and emerging trends, while balancing trade-offs between design, cost, value, risk, time, compliance, strategy and impact.
• Traceable enterprise architecture decisions: Recording decisions with lineage from business strategy and business cases, through the business operating model and IT portfolio planning to solution viewpoints and perspectives, ensuring traceability of the artifacts.
• Continuous learning and improvement: Leveraging retrospectives and lessons from past projects to enhance future initiatives.

The enterprise architect’s strategic importance

The role of the enterprise architect is pivotal in today’s business landscape. enterprise architects do much more than design technology solutions, they are the technology strategists for the business, with broad shoulders bearing many a load.

With the growing complexity of ecosystems, rapid technological advancements and increasing business demands and pace of change getting closer to the customer, enterprise architects must be adept at navigating these challenges while maintaining a focus on sustainability, security and innovation. Whether they are designing systems, managing ecosystems or steering businesses through emerging trends like AI, the enterprise architect’s ability to integrate business, strategy and technology is the key to driving business success. The rewards (financial, satisfaction) should naturally follow for the enterprise architect and propel them in their career progression!

David Jones is a distinguished enterprise architect and global partner at WVE International, providing IT leadership experience in areas of the CIO, chief architect and CTO to all levels of stakeholders involved in startup technology companies to large corporate enterprises. He brings more the 30 years of experience across a range of sectors including financial services, telecoms, transport, space and more recently in sport (AI) and public sector health regulation.

This article was made possible by our partnership with the IASA Chief Architect Forum. The CAF’s purpose is to test, challenge and support the art and science of Business Technology Architecture and its evolution over time as well as grow the influence and leadership of chief architects both inside and outside the profession. The CAF is a leadership community of the IASA, the leading non-profit professional association for business technology architects.