10 Ways the Role of the Enterprise Architect is Evolving

Nov 19

The traditional thinking of the role of an Enterprise Architect is more of the extension of the technology business unit. From a perspective, many business leaders may think the role of EA practitioners is questionable and theoretical, where they bring no impact at all on the business. The role of Enterprise Architect must also evolve and become a more proactive role in the organization. Instead of waiting people come to request or ask for help, the Enterprise Architects should act like salespersons to take the initiative of looking for the one needed for their services. We should break the mentality of why I need IT support if my computer works just fine.

Successful Enterprise Architects understand that a change of mindset is absolutely a necessity if you want to succeed in digital transformation. First, their mindset must shift from product delivery of IT-specific tasks to service-oriented delivery. They should be the evangelists who actively try to “sell” their ideas of the enterprise architecture and become supporters rather than expecting people to accept it and use it. Refrain from drilling to the Yes-we-can or No-we-can’t routine because the roles of Enterprise Architects are about reducing complexity and enabling people to do their works by empowering them with technology solutions. From personal experience, I feel I can provide better recommendations if I’m able to put myself into other people’s situations, whether it’s within the organization or customers. When people begin to work with you and give new information to evaluate your EA models, you are undoubtedly bringing value to the team and enable the business to create value from technology. Best of all, in the long run, you gain trust among the team. The classic EA role always involves training, but now this role has been evolved into trusted versus trained. Like a salesperson, modern Enterprise Architects require having the ability to connect with people and eventually connect throughout the organization. The more you see, the patterns of all things will emerge and become more apparent, and you will become a better architect as you put more time and effort into analysis than designing models. In the process, you become a keen observer.

When an organization is undergoing a digital transformation, you can see the progressive change in the role of Enterprise Architects from supporting business functions to enabling business agility. These changes will ultimately drive business productivity.

Modern Enterprise Architects needs to outgrow from the constraint of the IT department and need to act as the connectors between the peers and the latest technologies. The organization needs to recognize that Enterprise Architects is a part of the business strategy, rather than a functional department.