I want to define IT Architecture as the glue between a business, its objectives, and business services. Architecture is involved with all aspects of business services, including internal enterprise, business-to-business, creating customer services, or services that manage a business’s technical operations.
A good architect usually has a background in management and technology!
With a foundation in management, an architect is usually well placed to collaborate and understand executives’, their goals, and objectives.
A good architect also has a background in engineering, IT operations, likes to learn new technology, service management, and most importantly, understands how technology is bundled together to provide a resilient, secure, and highly responsive business.
An architect’s primary responsibility is to capture business objectives and translate the objectives into a design. Architects collaborate, review, and agree on new objectives with executives to create a skeleton approach to a design that meets business objectives.
An Architect translates a business goal into a technological Design
After an agreement with business executives, an architect meets with engineers, product specialists, project managers, and technical leads to meet and agree on technological solutions that will achieve the objectives drawn out in an architectural design.
Architects deliver the design as blueprints to managers, engineers, developers, and technical leads. An architect makes sure everyone sees the big picture, not just the current issues.
Inversely, architects articulate the engineering technical issues to the business. I like to joke about the idea, that an architect translates an engineering language into a language an executive can understand.
IT Architecture
An Information Technology architect’s primary goal at the beginning of any project is to capture and agree on the requirements, to understand the business processes necessary to help deliver business objectives.
Once requirements are understood and agreed, an architect or architecture organization creates documents and drawings that convey the concepts of a new technology solution.
I’d like to think that an architect delivers the blueprints for construction.
List of Architecture articles
http://architecture-introducing-new-systems-into-a-business
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