WHAT DOES AN ENTERPRISE ARCHITECT DO?

Published: Mar 31, 2025 – The Enterprise Architect collaborates across multiple technology domains to ensure alignment with organizational goals by evaluating major platforms and maintaining a comprehensive technology inventory. This position supports technology growth by working with domain architects, assisting in solution development, and managing architecture and application methodology processes. The architect also conducts market research, reviews vendor solutions, and analyzes technology trends to promote best practices and identify potential risks.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Enterprise Architect

1. Enterprise Architect Role Purpose

  • Technology Roadmapping: Create and implement a technology roadmap and multi-year plan
  • Enterprise Architecture: Responsible for enterprise architecture, including ensuring that the hardware and software architecture plans for the company are consistent with business and IT strategy.
  • Strategic Alignment: Continuously evolving the system's strategy and roadmap to maintain alignment with business strategy and objectives, as well as the technology landscape.
  • IT Strategy: Help define IT tactics using architecture plans to address the strategy.
  • IT Standards: Oversee and promote standards at all levels.
  • Team Leadership: Guide and direct the technology team to continuously improve company technology by working with the various leads from application, data, security, infrastructure and quality.
  • IT Optimization: Find ways in which to improve the IT department's functions so they support future goals.
  • Cost Reduction: Locate ways to reduce costs in IT.
  • Employee Development: Identify ways to increase employee productivity, knowledge, and skills to support future growth.
  • Business Architecture: Provide business architecture and systems processing guidance.
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Engaging with stakeholders to ensure alignment with business and IT roadmaps and solutions.
  • Solution Design: Work with the development teams to ensure overall solution design supports the business architecture.
  • Program Management: Setting the scope and approach for programs and projects to align with business objectives and roadmaps, and address core business opportunities and problems.
  • Enterprise Goals Mapping: Capture the tactical and strategic enterprise goals that provide traceability through the organization and are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing governance.
  • Technology Innovation: Responsible for bringing new technologies forward for potential solutions.

2. Enterprise Architect General Responsibilities

  • Change Management: Leading changes and improvements to the company’s business services through a mix of application, automation, and engineering activities.
  • Architecture Design: Designing architectures supporting modernization and developing roadmaps to achieve strategic objectives.
  • Modernization Planning: Planning and leading modernization initiatives – devising the approach and identifying all dependencies and subsequent tasks necessary for the effort.
  • Technology Research: Leading Research and Development efforts around the use of new technologies.
  • Project Leadership: Lead project teams to support the delivery of infrastructure, platform, and application projects.
  • Modernization Strategy: Developing, documenting, and recommending plans for investing in modernization solutions that will improve organizational resiliency and performance and/or provide cost reduction opportunities.
  • Engineering Support: Hands-on engineering in support of initiatives or to assist with production support.
  • Diversity and Inclusion: Support the company’s diversity and inclusion strategy by following policies and procedures that ensure opportunities for employees and diverse business partners.
  • Technology Advocacy: Promote and advocate technology solutions for business problems.
  • Enterprise Integration: Responsible for enterprise interfaces, message brokers, or application integrators that are considered enterprise in nature and part of the enterprise architecture.
  • Team Development: Ensure the steady development and training of teams.
  • IT Standardization: Work on establishing standardized IT models and frameworks.

3. Enterprise Architect Key Accountabilities

  • Platform Scalability: Find ways to improve the efficacy of the software platform to scale with future goals.
  • Technology Strategy: Create and execute a multi-year future state technology and architectural blueprint, strategy, and roadmap in collaboration with the appropriate Research and Development stakeholders.
  • Architecture Governance: Implement and enforce architecture standards within product platforms, ecosystem integration, and enterprise applications.
  • Risk Evaluation: Evaluate the product architecture, talent recruiting, and operational models for business risks.
  • Mergers and Acquisitions Analysis: Lead Mergers and Acquisitions opportunities, specifically in analyzing technology debt, fit, and roadmap for integration.
  • Cost Reduction: Identify ways to reduce costs in technology and gain operational leadership.
  • Employee Development: Identify ways to increase IT employees' knowledge and skills to support future growth.
  • Market Research: Conduct research in the industry to find ways to improve the product positioning.
  • Solution Design: Provide practical and comprehensive designs, patterns, and implementation approaches to ensure development is aligned with the desired target state.
  • Cloud Transformation: Lead the design for the transformation of existing applications and infrastructure services from physical data centers to cloud solutions.
  • Sourcing Strategy: Develops and maintains a technology sourcing strategy (build versus buy versus partner).
  • Business Alignment: Participate in any business sessions related to or focused on identifying operational and technology strategies, IT organizational structures, business decision support, and back office infrastructure.
  • Investment Strategy: Assess operational and technology investment strategies and compare respective operating models and structures to industry standards, and deployment of transformative enterprise architectures.
  • Research and Development Improvement: Help drive the maturity and enhancement of Research and Development methodologies and approaches.
  • Innovation Culture: Champion and breed a culture of process, design, and engineering innovation and excellence.

4. Enterprise Architect Roles and Details

  • Enterprise Architecture Management: Design, transform, and manage the IT enterprise architecture.
  • Architecture Maintenance: Ensure that the overall IT architecture is maintained and evolves coherently.
  • Strategic Alignment: Ensure that the respective business, application, data, and technology perspectives are in line with the agreed technology and governance strategies, policies, and standards.
  • Requirement Validation: Validate functional and other requirements and direct the activities of the design and development teams.
  • Architecture Blueprinting: Recommend and participate in the development of architecture blueprints for systems, solutions, and applications.
  • Strategic Planning: Recommend and participate in the analysis, evaluation, and development of enterprise medium and long-term strategic and operating plans, ensuring that the Enterprise Architecture objectives are consistent with the business objectives.
  • Solution Definition: Define the solution's scope and objectives.
  • Project Planning: Develop initiative or project-oriented high-level work plans and schedules.
  • Risk Management: Identify implementation risks and analyze the potential impact on the enterprise and the achievement of scheduled objectives.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with stakeholders across the organization, solutions architects, and development teams to determine the viability of architectural changes.
  • Compliance Evaluation: Evaluate applications and solutions for compliance with both enterprise and industry standards.
  • System Integration: Examine existing systems and solutions to identify areas for improvement and integration, and if required, propose new solution approaches.
  • Architecture Trend Analysis: Analyze current trends in the architecture domains and provide recommendations where relevant.
  • Technical Education: Educate technology personnel on best practices in areas like governance models and frameworks.
  • Client Engagement: Frequent client interactions to demonstrate solutions, review issues, and answer questions across the spectrum of architecture domains and solution areas.
  • Solution Implementation: Work with development teams and vendors to develop and implement key/core aspects of a solution.

5. Enterprise Architect Responsibilities and Key Tasks

  • Enterprise Architecture Development: Develop and enhance the overall IT and enterprise architecture for the bank covering the APAC region.
  • Technology Trend Monitoring: Keep IT and business management up to date on the latest trends and directions in the technology domain.
  • IT Transformation Leadership: Along with other IT management, set the direction to manage transformation for the IT function.
  • IT Improvement Programs: Run key IT improvement programs.
  • Architecture Team Leadership: Lead the regional enterprise architecture team and develop IT architecture standards, guidelines, and roadmap to ensure solutions remain current with industry best practices, technologies, alignment with the head office’s strategy, the Bank’s standards, and regulatory requirements.
  • IT Solution Consulting: Consult and influence IT solution development to enable the transition of the Bank’s systems from the current state to future requirements.
  • Architectural Training: Provide training and share best practices across APAC regarding digital architectural design and solution implementation.
  • Business Alignment: Build strong relationships and business acumen with the business to ensure architectures are aligned with business needs.
  • Customer Service: Provide exceptional customer service and solutions.
  • System Architecture Design: Develop and apply industry best practice technology, design, and methodology approaches to design system architecture.
  • Technology Research: Research and recommend new emerging technologies, techniques, and tools that will add value to the organization.
  • Architecture Modeling: Create architecture models that reflect the company's strategy and technology direction.
  • Roadmap Facilitation: Facilitate and recommend roadmaps for large and complex initiatives to ensure that organizational goals for business, security, reliability, and performance are achieved.
  • Architecture Governance: Manage and develop architecture governance.

6. Enterprise Architect Responsibilities

  • Architecture Analysis: Regularly analyze which systems, functions, and architecture capabilities will be critical to the ability to develop cloud services with speed and quality, and in response, propose and establish supporting architecture.
  • Architecture Documentation: Document and publish architecture guidelines spanning data, applications, infrastructure, and technology architecture.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with stakeholders throughout the company, typically leaders in Product, Engineering, Operations, Corporate IT, Security, Finance, and Business Operations, to understand future business requirements and factor those into an architecture roadmap.
  • Architecture Communication: Act as an internal champion of agreed architecture by communicating it, in writing via easy-to-understand and digest guidelines, and verbally by presenting and explaining to technical teams.
  • Technical Support: Support technical teams with reviews of system design proposals, assist them in building skills in relevant technologies, and assist in migration planning toward the target architecture.
  • Solution Design Collaboration: Work closely with other architects at different levels (enterprise, system, and technical) and technical leaders to produce solution designs that satisfy solution requirements and are in line with the enterprise-level architecture.
  • Virtual Product Architecture: Application and IT Architecture for virtual product/3D.
  • Solution Implementation: From target architecture, through software selection and solution design, to framing the robust implementations.
  • Business Architecture Development: Evolve the Business Architecture and value stream work for virtual product/3D, developing a strategic network (from senior leaders to subject matter experts), and strengthening the role of architecture as an enabler of a consistent Data and Technology blueprint.
  • Architecture Maintenance: Responsible for up-to-date architectural artefacts and architectural patterns.
  • Project Partnership: Partnering with project teams to design, create, and re-use the same.

7. Enterprise Architect Job Summary

  • Technology Domain Alignment: Work across multiple technology domains to drive common processes and alignment to both the current and future needs of the entire organization through regular evaluation of major technology platforms to determine viability.
  • Technology Strategy Alignment: Make sure that a company's business strategy uses proper technology systems architecture to achieve its goals.
  • Roadmap Collaboration: Work with domain architects to leverage roadmaps, models, and research to manage the growth and adoption of technology.
  • Technology Inventory Management: Maintain a technology inventory and monitor technology acquisitions to minimize duplication.
  • Solution Support: Assist solution architects with ideas for solving business pain points.
  • Technology Trend Analysis: Analyze current trends in technology architecture and educate others in the Information Technology department about new frameworks and best practices.
  • Vendor Evaluation Support: Support vendor product evaluations as requested to ensure alignment with current technology standards and practices.
  • ADR Administration: Provide support and administration of the Architecture Design Review (ADR) process.
  • ADM Administration: Provide support and administration of the Application Development Methodology (ADM) process and deliverables.
  • Risk Identification: Review of Application Service Provider questionnaires as requested to provide early identification of technical risks and issues.
  • Market Research: Provide market/vendor research for technology solutions when requested.
  • Technology Roadmapping: Develop technology strategies and product roadmaps as requested by IT management.

8. Enterprise Architect Accountabilities

  • Technology Strategy Definition: Lead and contribute to the definition of an overarching technology strategy and architecture that will align investments with the highest impact areas, while producing a suite of complementary models, tools, and technologies.
  • Enterprise Architecture Strategy: Develop and refine enterprise architecture strategy by working with business and IT leadership to modernize systems to make data available for use cases and data-driven decision-making.
  • Architecture Principles Inclusion: Ensure the inclusion of architectural principles in all internal technology projects.
  • EA Deliverables Maintenance: Update and maintain the key Enterprise Architecture deliverables.
  • Architectural Issue Resolution: Provide architectural leadership in the resolution of inter-program and inter-project issues.
  • Architecture Communication: Ongoing publicity and communication of the Enterprise Architecture both within the internal technology discipline and the business units.
  • Architecture Research: Ongoing research and assessment of new analysis approaches for potential use within the Enterprise.
  • Technology Roadmapping: Work with business stakeholders to develop technology roadmaps to support the business strategy, outcomes, and capabilities.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to create a shared vision of excellence.
  • Best Practices Comparison: Compare external best practices to internal solutions and find areas of opportunity.
  • Architecture Improvement: Drive continuous improvement in the technical architecture of existing solutions.
  • Architecture Practice Development: Ready to help shape the architecture practice and make an impact on the firm’s growth.
  • Strategic Advisory: Strategic thought leader advising on building technical roadmaps, defining modern enterprise architecture, and guiding teams to deliver it successfully.
  • API Governance: Ensure that APIs have a standard, effective format, clear specification, and effective versioning policies.
  • API Documentation: Maintain a well-documented API and Service Catalogue.
  • API Usage Management: Ensure APIs and services are used appropriately, and functionality is not duplicated.

9. Enterprise Architect Functions

  • Product Architecture: Drive overall product portfolio software architecture to meet the product and business goals.
  • Architectural Vision: Contribute to a clear Architectural Vision in the roadmaps for the development of the products in the short, medium, and long term.
  • Stakeholder Interaction: Interact with key stakeholders across Business Product Management, System Architecture, Regulatory, and Advanced Development teams to ensure the product development vision in the business is informed and supported by the Roadmap.
  • Architectural Directives: Contribute to a small set of key Architectural Directives to guide all software engineering work across the organization.
  • Architecture Specification: Contribute to the creation and maintenance of an Architectural specification and Architectural Roadmap for the Platforms.
  • Roadmap Delivery: Deliver contributions to the Roadmap in a timely fashion so that new features are brought into Products in an orderly way, with Architecture Runways prepared in good time ahead of ongoing delivery.
  • Model Preparation: Ensure that data models, process models, and APIs have been established to a useful base level ahead of the start of delivery trains.
  • Platform Adoption: Work with the wider team to drive understanding and easy adoption of the Platform for all software engineering teams.
  • Service-Based Architecture: Help guide towards a modern service-based architecture for composable services and UIs.
  • Cloud Readiness: Work to ensure that products are cloud-ready and can safely and easily support recent and new technologies such as Machine Learning, Data Analytics, SaaS-based collaborator apps, mobile as well as desktop access, etc.
  • Functional Architecture: Contribute to a clear model of the Functional Architecture across the product portfolio.
  • Distributed Design: Use functional domains as the basis for distributed design and governance processes across the business.
  • Domain Coordination: Help establish and coordinate curators for each functional domain.
  • Data Model Translation: Assist systems architects and engineers in translating the logical data model into appropriate concrete data storage schemas, API parameters, etc.
  • API Governance: Help to guide and govern APIs and Services used across the product portfolio.

10. Enterprise Architect Job Description

  • Business Planning Support: Assist the customer in business planning and strategy by focusing on business capabilities and maturity.
  • Target State Definition: Understand customer needs and the company's products/services, and match them with best-in-class technology to define a north-star target state.
  • Transformation Roadmapping: Help to define prioritization and sequencing of the transformation by proposing a strategic roadmap that leads to the target state.
  • Change Program Leadership: Lead key discussions around change programs from both business and technical perspectives.
  • Technology Selection: Determine which Salesforce and third-party technologies to leverage in the customer's architecture landscape, based on product knowledge, industry experience, industry-standard EA frameworks, and Salesforce EA methodologies.
  • Architecture Articulation: Articulate business architecture (mission/vision, capability models, capability assessments) and technical architecture (current and future state diagrams, solution best practices, reference architectures, design patterns).
  • Customer Transformation Insights: Provide reliable and trusted data-rich points of view of relatable customer transformations in the industry, i.e., how other customers with similar needs have succeeded in their transformation.
  • Sales Support: Assist sales teams in responding to RFPs and technical requirements documents.
  • Opportunity Development: Actively engage with account executives and solution engineers to develop opportunities for customer-facing enterprise architecture engagements.
  • EA Value Promotion: Continuously promote and communicate the value of Enterprise Architecture both within the solution engineering community as well as within the broader sales and customer success organizations.
  • Professional Development: Participate in all appropriate product/sales training, certifications, educational sessions, and industry summits to acquire and maintain the knowledge necessary to be effective in the position.
  • Knowledge Sharing: Share engagement experience with the internal audiences and enrich the collective IP.
  • Architecture Enablement: Conduct architecture workshops and other enablement sessions, mentor and guide junior enterprise architects.
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