Are you an Entrepreneur who has a huge repository of ideas and a vision to expand your business? However to grow this business, you need your IT Systems Architecture to be in synergy with your business processes from initial customer contact to point of delivery delivery. If you are a small business you may not have the breadth of skills required to give you the sky scraper view to give you a balanced perspective on your IT. For a small business it doesn't make sense to have a permanent architect on the team - the numbers don't add up for a decent ROI.
We are constantly bombarded with new technologies and the buzzwords that come with the emerging technologies. This adds a certain element of mystery to the technologies. How can we make sense of all this and then put forward a strategy for the business? Bosses of small enterprises simply don't have the time to go to effort to understand this. It would simply take too much effort, when the business owner should be focused on growing his business.
Enterprise Architecture should help with aligning IT with your business. As a relatively young discipline, Enterprise Architecture is the middle area that sits between business and the IT department. They tend to lean towards the business areas as they (or they should) appreciate its the business that drives the work of the IT department. So who are these IT Specialists. Well they have a number of names and this possibly adds to the confusion of what these various roles perform. Enterprise Architecture, IT Architect, Technical Architect and others. What makes this worse is if you ask a number of IT people what these specialist actually do; in all likelihood you will get different answers. The main point is that the Architect should be quite closely aligned with the business but also have the technical prowess to explain to the business how IT can benefit the business.
In summary, they also need to be IT experts in a number of areas, but have the breadth of knowledge to appreciate the current state in IT. For example, explain the benefits of SOA or Cloud Computing (etc) in plain english to the business. This is a formidable brief for an architect and it is acquired with a combination of hands on experience and understanding the impact on business. It is unlikely, as has already been mentioned; that a small organisation would have an IT architect on their payroll. There would be a number of reasons for this. First is the cost implications and affordability. Secondly, an Architect would not have the work to keep them interested in the role; simply for the reason that a small business will not likely to have large IT Infrastructure. The importance of Architects I believe will grow in importance but more than that; Architecture in the IT domain is a specialist discipline that is evolving and growing. It is a discipline that needs to address the complexities of organisations and their interactions - a challenge that opens up significant opportunities to truly knowledgeable Architects.
We are constantly bombarded with new technologies and the buzzwords that come with the emerging technologies. This adds a certain element of mystery to the technologies. How can we make sense of all this and then put forward a strategy for the business? Bosses of small enterprises simply don't have the time to go to effort to understand this. It would simply take too much effort, when the business owner should be focused on growing his business.
Enterprise Architecture should help with aligning IT with your business. As a relatively young discipline, Enterprise Architecture is the middle area that sits between business and the IT department. They tend to lean towards the business areas as they (or they should) appreciate its the business that drives the work of the IT department. So who are these IT Specialists. Well they have a number of names and this possibly adds to the confusion of what these various roles perform. Enterprise Architecture, IT Architect, Technical Architect and others. What makes this worse is if you ask a number of IT people what these specialist actually do; in all likelihood you will get different answers. The main point is that the Architect should be quite closely aligned with the business but also have the technical prowess to explain to the business how IT can benefit the business.
In summary, they also need to be IT experts in a number of areas, but have the breadth of knowledge to appreciate the current state in IT. For example, explain the benefits of SOA or Cloud Computing (etc) in plain english to the business. This is a formidable brief for an architect and it is acquired with a combination of hands on experience and understanding the impact on business. It is unlikely, as has already been mentioned; that a small organisation would have an IT architect on their payroll. There would be a number of reasons for this. First is the cost implications and affordability. Secondly, an Architect would not have the work to keep them interested in the role; simply for the reason that a small business will not likely to have large IT Infrastructure. The importance of Architects I believe will grow in importance but more than that; Architecture in the IT domain is a specialist discipline that is evolving and growing. It is a discipline that needs to address the complexities of organisations and their interactions - a challenge that opens up significant opportunities to truly knowledgeable Architects.
SHARE
