This is a question I am often asked by my clients, and it one that is both simple and complex to answer. If you start trying to break it down by role and title it quickly becomes a melange of mixed signals, confusing boundaries and responsibilities and a mess of unclear roles.
At a high level there are buckets such as enterprise, solution, cloud and so on which have a sense of uniformity in purpose but to me, these are really just shades of grey. Within these buckets there is still a lot of confusion.
If we step back and look at what architecture delivers to an organisation, we can quickly get to a better picture of what architecture does as a whole. Within that exists skill sets which cover the wide and ever increasing complexity of modern IT, and organisations hire people who have the knowledge and skill to meet those.
Stepping back, architecture is really focused on:
- The translation of business goals and vision into realisable IT capability which supports and aligns to the business objectives, cost and target state
- The translation of business requirements into designs that deliver applications, networks, cloud capability, security and compliance, data and integrity and integration amongst other things
- It requires the architecture to understand both the technological and business worlds and to really understand the limitations within which they work. To be able to partner with the delivery capability and support the delivery of projects and programs to the organisation as well as working to keep BAU humming along •It requires the architect to never stop learning
- It is a part of the 3 pillars that form the heart of change, growth and vision for an organisation