Essential Roles and Responsibilities of an Enterprise Architect in a Company
Information technology is rapidly changing and many organizations are adapting to it. You need an enterprise architect to ensure that while you are investing heavily in the IT department for your business, the activities and objectives that the department is aiming at are responding with the goals of the organization. The roles and responsibilities of an enterprise architect are numerous to allow the objective of an organization to materialize.
The Enterprise architect make sure that the administration provides enough resources for the IT department to run its activities and accomplish its projects. The executive management and other managers may not understand the importance of the organization investing in technology, but the enterprise architecture represents the department in such a way that they get to understand.
Employees, investors among others are as important as the customers, but most of them will not understand why the IT Department has them to integrate specific IT technologies in the business operations; therefore the business architect ensures that there are programs to take care of adequately informing them. They counter, and correct misinformation and misconceptions about the changes in the IT technology the other stakeholders may have that may be the reasons why they are rejecting the project. The enterprise architecture will work with the department to devise means of educating customers to address their concerns.
They will ensure that the organization gets the right people for the job in IT so that there is a smooth process from inception of data into the organization to storage and up to when stakeholders need the information form the data to make decisions. The changes in technology are compelling organizations to use artificial intelligence in the operations, and there should be people who are skilled enough to operate the systems. Cloud computing, telecommuting, database administration among other innovations create the need for an enterprise architect.
The enterprise architect worked hand-in-hand with the strategic management managers to ensure that the activities the IT department undertake do not contradict the objectives of the organization. If an organization is to fire employees for them to invest in technology where are the department needs more employees, the enterprise architect may decide to outsource the services instead of hiring. The enterprise architect may also upgrade the old system instead of buying new ones to sell the company on significant costs. These examples show you how an enterprise architect can align the activities of The IT Department with those of the organization.