Job Description

Job Overview

The Enterprise Architect is accountable for proactively and holistically leading enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analyzing the execution of change toward the desired business vision and targeted outcomes. The Enterprise Architect is responsible for taking a practical approach to supporting the business. This starts and ends with a focus on delivering signature-ready, actionable recommendations to business leaders, so they can adjust policies and projects to achieve target business outcomes.

The Enterprise Architect is responsible for helping business leaders enable their future-state business capabilities that, in turn, drive the organization's targeted business outcomes through the choice of programs, projects and initiatives the organization chooses to invest in. Enterprise Architects must be capable of practically applying existing, new and emerging technologies to new and evolving business and operating models. Conversely, they must be able to understand, monetize and operationalize new technologies.

Enterprise Architects lead and coordinate all aspects of the EA program, including:

• business architecture, which is focused on guiding people, process and organizational change;
• Information architecture, which is focused on the consistent sharing of information across the enterprise;
• Solutions architecture, which is focused on developing a direction for managing the portfolio of to-be solutions;
• Technical architecture, which is focused on evolving the technical infrastructure; and
• Security architecture, which is focused on managing IT risk through the exchange of information between people, systems and things inside and outside the organization. Application architecture is a subset of solutions architecture. It's the discipline that guides application design and defines application architecture paradigms, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), principles that influence design decisions and patterns that provide proven design solutions.

The Enterprise Architect is accountable for leading, managing and balancing a bimodal EA program -- one EA team, with two modes of operating -- to run, grow and transform the business. Mode 1 is foundational EA (tactical), which maintains and evolves future-state business capabilities with a focus on efficiency and predictability of the existing IT estate. Mode 2 is vanguard EA (strategic), which designs and enables future-state business capabilities with a focus on technology disruption, speed, agility, and flexibility that enables and drives new business models and designs, while meeting today's business needs with an optimized Mode 1 strategy.

Lead the EA program and its efforts to develop, maintain and govern the enterprise architecture across the organization. They are responsible for defining the EA process and architecture review and advisory process, and for leading the integration of those processes with related business and IT processes.

Scope of Activities

The Enterprise Architect will demonstrate competencies across six key dimensions.

Lead and Influence

• Lead the creation or evolution of the enterprise architecture program/function (if managing and appointed as Enterprise Architect).
• Promote the business value of the EA program/function and its process, and the results of the EA program to business and IT leaders/executives.
• Lead the development of an implementation plan for the enterprise architecture based on business strategy and requirements.
• Seek opportunities to highlight how digital business initiatives will potentially impact enterprises' economic architecture and metrics.

Identify Ecosystems and Develop Business Models

• Understand the business's economic and financial levers that are susceptible to digital transformation, so as to effectively support and guide technology investment decisions.
• Design and construct future- and current-state business models so as to practically apply new and emerging technologies to drive them.
• Detail potential competitive threats from digital enterprises that are generally considered outside of your traditional realm of competition.

Focus on Strategy and Execution

• Demonstrate the business value of EA as an enabler of strategy formulation, and as support for technology innovation, which drives the organization's top and bottom lines.
• Formulate, translate, advocate, support and execute business strategy to achieve the organization's targeted business outcomes.
• Construct technology-enabled operating models, and provide viable options and visibility into execution issues.

Research and Understand Technology and Nontechnology Trends

• Scan the world for major disruptive technology and nontechnology trends (trendspotting) that affect business. Provide practical advice and best practices to overcome these challenges and successfully deliver the expected business outcomes.
• Contextualize the technology trends based on social, economic, political and other nontechnology trends.
• Lead the analysis of business and operating models, market trends and the technology industry to determine their potential impact on the enterprise's business strategy, direction and architecture.

Enable Enterprise Ideation and Innovation

• Track and apply innovative and existing technologies, anchoring them in the business model to assess their potential, and use rapid prototyping approaches to evolve innovations.
• Run technology experiments, helping to create new products and services and integrating the best of theses into steady-state operations for the organization.

Determine and Help Orchestrate the Delivery of Business Outcomes

• Guide and advise stakeholders about disruptive technologies and trends.
• Determine the relationship between people, processes, information, technology and things of the enterprise, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment.
• Work with business peers to develop and present business capability models and roadmaps to facilitate discussion and decision making with stakeholders across the enterprise.
• Lead analysis of the business' future-state capabilities and future (and current) IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement and driving the business forward.
• Work with business peers and lead the identification and analysis of enterprise business outcomes and drivers to derive useful business context, and in response to disruptive forces.
• Develop diagnostic and actionable deliverables that help business guide investment decisions in support of executing business strategy.
• Lead analysis of the IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
• Provide perspective on the readiness of the organization to change and innovate.
• Present a gap analysis and/or IT investment roadmap that reflects the status of the existing IT estate, namely, its ability to contribute to future-state business capabilities around ecosystems and digital platforms.
• Lead the development of an implementation plan for the enterprise architecture based on business requirements and IT strategies.
• Lead and facilitate the creation of governance, assurance and standards to guide EA decision making.
• Ensure that the optimal governance structure and compliance activities are associated with EA compliance.
• Oversee the evaluation and selection of EA standards, as necessary.
• Oversee EA implementation and ongoing refinement activities.
• Oversee EA implementation, continuous improvement and ongoing refinement activities.
• Oversee the documentation of all architecture design and analysis work.
• Consult with infrastructure, project and product teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to identify when it is necessary to modify the enterprise architecture.
• Identify organizational requirements for the resources, structures and cultural changes necessary to support the enterprise architecture.
• Oversee the documentation of all architecture design and analysis work.
• Lead the development and execution of a communication and education plan for the enterprise architecture.
• Communicate the value of the enterprise architecture to the organization.
• Lead the development and execution of a communication and education plan for the enterprise architecture.

Skills

Credentials and Experience

• Master's or Bachelor's degree in business, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience
• Seven or more years of experience in at least three disciplines, such as business, information, solution or technical architecture, application development, middleware, information analysis, database management or operations in a multitier environment
• Five or more years of business experience in strategic and operations planning and/or business analysis

Skills

• Knowledge of business models, operating models, financial models, cost-benefit analysis, budgeting and risk management
• Familiarity with information management practices, system development life cycle management, IT services management, infrastructure and operations, and EA and ITIL frameworks
• Knowledge of business ecosystems, SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), SOA, APIs, open data, microservices, event-driven IT and predictive analytics
• Exposure and understanding of existing, new and emerging technologies, and processing environments
• Exceptional soft and interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation and negotiation
• Strong leadership skills
• Excellent analytical and technical skills
• Excellent written, verbal, communication and presentation skills
• Excellent planning and organizational skills
• Knowledge of all components of holistic enterprise architecture
• Knowledge of business engineering principles and processes
• Familiarity with basic graphical modeling approaches, tools and model repositories

Competencies

• Organizationally savvy, and understanding of the political climate of the enterprise and how to navigate obstacles and politics
• Ability to balance the long-term ("big picture") and short-term implications of individual decisions
• Ability to translate business needs into EA requirements
• Ability to estimate the financial impact of EA alternatives
• Ability to apply multiple solutions to business problems
• Ability to rapidly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new technologies
• Capable and comfortable with balancing time between foundational EA (Mode 1: ensures efficiency and predictability) and vanguard EA efforts (Mode 2: concerned with speed, agility and flexibility to achieve a unified and flexible EA that meets the organization's needs)
• Ready to think, behave and act in an innovative consulting manner to drive the organization's digital business strategies
• Understand and speak the language of the business
• Influential in the organization and a team player
• Effective at driving short-term actions that are consistent with long-term goals

Characteristics

• Trusted and respected as a thought leader who can influence and persuade business and IT leaders