Tag: enterprise architect

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erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architect Salary: What to Expect and Why

Enterprise architecture plays a key role in the modern enterprise, so the average enterprise architect salary reflects the demand.

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Average Enterprise Architect Salary

LinkedIn data from 808 self-reporting enterprise architects indicates that the average enterprise architect’s salary is $146,000.

As with most professions, enterprise architect salaries tend to increase with years of experience.

Enterprise architects who add enterprise architecture certifications to their resume also report higher earnings.

In Glassdoor’s 25 Best Jobs in the UK for 2020 report, enterprise architect came out on top.

It is “the first technology role to be named the ‘best job in the UK,’ beating marketing, finance and ops roles that have traditionally taken the top spot,” according to Amanda Stansell, Senior Economic Research Analyst at Glassdoor.

The report looked beyond just salary as a factor, encompassing job openings and job satisfaction as well.

Interestingly, DevOps engineer is one of 11 new roles to make the list.

Considering the trends of digital transformation and agile business, DevOps engineer and enterprise architect’s inclusion among the top jobs is likely linked.

What Does an Enterprise Architect Do?

An enterprise architect – not to be confused with a solutions architect, technical architect or data architect – is a specialist in collaborating to establish desired business outcomes by introducing the infrastructure necessary to achieve them.

 

For more info about how enterprise architecture differs from solutions, technical and data architecture, see:

Enterprise architects typically delegate the technical- and solution-specific tasks to technical and solution architects. This makes leadership, management and communication skills vital arrows in the enterprise architect’s quiver.

Often reporting to C-level roles such as the chief information officer, enterprise architects:

  • Align business and IT functions with the organization’s goals
  • Assess/analyze an enterprise’s systems and assets to establish both redundancies and current architecture gaps
  • Analyze risk and impact related to the acquisition of new systems or phasing out/changing current systems
  • Collaborate with stakeholders from different areas of the business to ensure a complete view of the enterprise architecture

Enterprise Architect Salary and Job Description

Enterprise Architect Salary Expectations

As with any career, enterprise architect salary expectations are driven by their value to an organization and the responsibilities they are expected to take on.

Enterprise architects help organizations develop a holistic, informative view of the organization to inform strategic planning.

Increasingly, the latter half of the above statement is foregrounded. Data-driven business has seen enterprise architects evolve from providing a support-focused, foundational function to one that is forward-thinking and business-outcome oriented.

Of course, enterprise architects have always been concerned with the latter but were hamstrung by their perception as working from an ivory tower.

Now the changing business landscape, as well as improvements to enterprise architecture management systems (EAMS) that have made them more collaborative, is helping organizations see them in a new light.

What’s Influencing Enterprise Architecture Salaries?

The demand for enterprise architects is increasing because of colossal changes in the way most enterprises do business.

And from SMBs to large, multinational corporations, most organizations now manage more increasingly complex architectures, more so than just a decade ago.

Organizations striving to optimize and not just manage their enterprise architectures need both the personnel and systems to facilitate this.

The Tools Enterprise Architects Need to Thrive

The demand for enterprise architects isn’t increasing because organizations want to recycle past approaches to the domain.

No, the days of enterprise architecture being viewed primarily as a support function are over.

Today, enterprise architects serve a valuable strategic function within the organization and should be equipped to succeed.

Enterprise architecture management systems (EAMS), as opposed to limited or repurposed Office tools that have to be updated and managed independently, enable enterprise architects to create a central source of truth for as-is and to-be states.

This prevents oversights and errors, allowing enterprise architects to be proactive in guiding an organization in fulfilling its mission with the necessary systems.

Learn more about enterprise architecture management systems.

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erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

The Difference Between Enterprise Architecture and Solutions Architecture

Despite the similarities in name, there are a number of key differences between enterprise architecture and solutions architecture.

Much like the differences between enterprise architecture (EA) and data architecture, EA’s holistic view of the enterprise will often see enterprise and solution architects collaborate.

And as with data architecture, a solution architect’s focus is narrower.

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What Is a Solutions Architect?

Solutions architecture is about solving problems. It describes the process of orchestrating software engineering to address an organization’s needs.

Typically, a solution architect’s responsibilities cover:

  • Assessing and understanding an organization’s technological assets
  • Finding a solution to address a problem
  • Defining and denoting the critical technologies for the organization’s operations
  • Understanding the impact of time on the current technologies in place, including establishing what can be scaled and what must be replaced/upgraded
  • Designing prototype solutions
  • Assessing and selecting new technologies

Their technical skills typically include software engineering and design, DevOps, business analysis and increasingly, cloud architecture.

What Is an Enterprise Architect?

Broadly speaking, enterprise architecture is a strategic planning initiative.

Enterprise architects are concerned with how they can reduce costs, eliminate redundancies in technology and processes, and prepare for, mitigate and manage the impact of change.

To operate effectively, enterprise architects must have a solid understanding of the organizations they work with/for.

Such an understanding has its advantages, but it also means that there isn’t the scope to be concerned with the more “technical” side of an organization’s architecture.

Typically, an enterprise architect’s responsibilities cover:

  • Understanding and developing the whole enterprise architecture
  • Evaluating risks and the impacts of change and creating a roadmap with such evaluations considered
  • Ensuring alignment between the business and IT through the organization’s enterprise architecture
  • Advising decision-makers and business leaders from an organization-wide, holistic perspective of the enterprise

From this perspective, solution architecture’s value to enterprise architecture becomes even more clear. Where an enterprise architect is concerned with the EA’s current state, and the strategy to reach the desired future-state, solutions architects act on that strategic direction.

Enterprise Architecture Tools

Enterprise Architects vs. Solutions Architects

Perhaps it’s misleading to use “versus” to describe the difference between enterprise architecture and solutions architecture. They are very much collaborators in the organization and should not be looked at as competitive in terms of which provides more value.

A better way of highlighting the difference between the two is through their focus on strategy vs. technology.

A focus on strategy implies a broad understanding of the mechanics of any given technology. This is because there is a lot more to strategy than just the technology needed to implement it. A skewed focus on technology would mean that the processes, people and other variables required to inform strategy are ignored.

Conversely, a focus on technology is necessary to ensure implementations and operations can run smoothly. By its nature, it is more “in the weeds” and so the necessary holistic perspective of the organization can be harder to understand and/or account for.

With their holistic view of the organization, enterprise architects take on the strategy. They then use their strategic planning perspective to inform and delegate to solutions architects.

In the same vain, a technical architect has a low strategic focus and a high technological focus.

Bottom line,  an enterprise architect’s strategic focus is high and their technology focus is low; technology architects operate in the reverse; and solution architects bridge the two.

The Imperative for Enterprise Architecture and Solutions Architecture

With the quickening pace of digital transformation and the increased acceleration owed to the Covid-19 crisis, enterprise architects and solution architects are becoming increasingly relevant.

“Enterprise architect” was named the top tech job in the UK for 2020 and as this article implies, solution architects should stand to benefit, as well.

However, simply hiring enterprise architects and solution architects isn’t enough. Enterprise architecture in particular has been blighted by its perception as a role operating in an ivory tower, disconnected from the wider business.

Considering IT and business alignment is a core tenant of an enterprise architect’s responsibilities, this is obviously counter-productive.

For many organizations, shaking this perception will require a change in how enterprise architecture is done. Organizations need a definable, measurable and collaborative approach to enterprise architecture to make the most out of its vast potential.

This means moving away from low maturity examples of enterprise architecture that are managed through a hodgepodge of repurposed tools, and decentralized notes.

erwin is helping organizations mature their EA with erwin Evolve. With Evolve, organizations can collaborate within a purpose-built enterprise architecture tool for both greater consistency and involvement from the wider business.

As part of the wider erwin Enterprise Data Governance Experience (EDGE), erwin Evolve lets organizations synergize their enterprise architecture with their data governance and management strategies.

This means that efforts to manage the enterprise architecture include a data inclusive perspective. And considering data’s value as an asset, this perspective is vital.

It means an organization can get a clear and full picture of the whole data lifecycle in relation to the systems and broader context it exists in, so that the intersections between data and the organization’s assets is clearer.

Organizations can try erwin Evolve for free and keep any content you produce should you decide to buy.

For more information on enterprise architecture, click here to get the erwin Experts’ definitive guide to enterprise architecture – 100% free of charge.

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Managing Ideation and Innovation with Enterprise Architecture

Organizations largely recognize the need for enterprise architecture tools, yet some still struggle to communicate their value and prioritize such initiatives.

As data-driven business thrives, organizations will have to overcome these challenges because managing IT trends and emerging technologies makes enterprise architecture (EA) increasingly relevant.

“By 2021, 40 percent of organizations will use enterprise architects to help ideate new business innovations made possible by emerging technologies,” says Marcus Blosch, Vice President Analyst, Gartner.

With technology now vital to every aspect of the business, enterprise architecture tools and EA as a function help generate and evaluate ideas that move the business forward.

Every business has its own (often ad hoc) way of gathering ideas and evaluating them to see how they can be implemented and what it would take to deploy them.

But organizations can use enterprise architecture tools to bridge the gap between ideation and implementation, making more informed choices in the process.

By combining enterprise architecture tools with the EA team’s knowledge in a process for managing ideas and innovation, organizations can be more strategic in their planning.

Emerging technologies is one of the key areas in which such a process benefits an organization. The timely identification of emerging technologies can make or break a business. The more thought that goes into the planning of when and how to use emerging technologies, the better the implementation, which leads to better outcomes and greater ROI.

Gartner emphasize the value of enterprise architecture tools

Enterprise Architecture Tools: The Fabric of Your Organization

At its 2019 Gartner Enterprise Architecture & Technology Innovation Summit, Gartner identified 10 emerging and strategic technology trends that will shape IT in the coming years.

They included trends that utilize intelligence, such as autonomous things and augmented analytics; digital trends like empowered edge and immersive experiences; mesh trends like Blockchain and smart spaces; as well as broad concepts like digital ethics and privacy and quantum computing.

As these trends develop into applications or become part of your organization’s fabric, you need to think about how they can help grow your business in the near and long term. How will your business investigate their use? How will you identify the people who understand how they can be used to drive your business?

Many organizations lack a structured approach for gathering and investigating employee ideas, especially those around emerging technologies. This creates two issues:

1. When employee ideas fall into a black hole where they don’t get feedback, the employees become less engaged.

2. The emerging technology and its implementation are disconnected, which leads to silos or wasted resources.

How Enterprise Architecture Tools Help Communicate the Value of Emerging Technologies

When your enterprise architecture is aligned with your business outcomes it provides a way to help your business ideate and investigate the viability of ideas on both the technical and business level. When aligned correctly, emerging technologies can be evaluated based on how they meet business needs and what the IT organization must do to support them.

But the only way you can accurately make those determinations is by having visibility into your IT services and the application portfolio. And that’s how enterprise architecture can help communicate the value of emerging technologies in your organization.

erwin EA provides a way to quickly and efficiently understand opportunities offered by new technologies, process improvements and portfolio rationalization and translate them into an actionable strategy for the entire organization.

Take erwin EA for a free spin thanks to our secure, cloud-based trial.

Enterprise Architecture Business Process Trial

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erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

Data-Driven Enterprise Architecture

It’s time to consider data-driven enterprise architecture.

The traditional approach to enterprise architecture – the analysis, design, planning and implementation of IT capabilities for the successful execution of enterprise strategy – seems to be missing something … data.

I’m not saying that enterprise architects only worry about business structure and high-level processes without regard for business needs, information requirements, data processes, and technology changes necessary to execute strategy.

But I am saying that enterprise architects should look at data, technology and strategy as a whole to develop perspectives in line with all enterprise requirements.

That’s right. When it comes to technology and governance strategies, policies and standards, data should be at the center.

Strategic Building Blocks for Data-Driven EA

The typical notion is that enterprise architects and data (and metadata) architects are in opposite corners. Therefore, most frameworks fail to address the distance.

At Avydium, we believe there’s an important middle ground where different architecture disciplines coexist, including enterprise, solution, application, data, metadata and technical architectures. This is what we call the Mezzo.

Avydium Compass Mezzo view
Figure 1 – The Avydium Compass™ Mezzo view

So we created a set of methods, frameworks and reference architectures that address all these different disciplines, strata and domains. We treat them as a set of deeply connected components, objects, concepts and principles that guide a holistic approach to vision, strategy, solutioning and implementations for clients.

For us at Avydium, we see the layers of this large and complex architecture continuum as a set of building blocks that need to work together – each supporting the others.

Avydium Compass view of enterprise architecture
Figure 2 – The Avydium Compass® view of enterprise architecture

For instance, you can’t develop a proper enterprise strategy without implementing a proper governance strategy, and you can’t have an application strategy without first building your data and metadata strategies. And they all need to support your infrastructure and technology strategies.

Where do these layers connect? With governance, which sets its fundamental components firmly on data, metadata and infrastructure. For any enterprise to make the leap from being a reactive organization to a true leader in its space, it must focus on data as the driver of that transformation.

DATA-DRIVEN BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION – USING DATA AS A STRATEGIC ASSET AND TRANSFORMATIONAL TOOL TO SUCCEED IN THE DIGITAL AGE

 

Data-Driven Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Migration

Let’s look at the example of cloud migration, which most enterprises see as a way to shorten development cycles, scale at demand, and reduce operational expenses. But as cloud migrations become more prevalent, we’re seeing more application modernization efforts fail, which should concern all of us in enterprise architecture.

The most common cause for these failures is disregarding data and metadata, omitting these catalogs from inventory efforts, part of application rationalization and portfolio consolidation that must occur prior to any application being migrated to the cloud.

Thus, key steps of application migration planning, such as data preparation, master data management and reference data management, end up being ignored with disastrous and costly ramifications. Applications fail to work together, data is integrated incorrectly causing massive duplication, and worse.

At Avydium, our data-driven enterprise architecture approach puts data and metadata at the center of cloud migration or any application modernization or digital transformation effort. That’s because we want to understand – and help clients understand – important nuances only visible at the data level, such as compliance and privacy/security risks (remember GDPR?). You want to be proactive in identifying potential issues with sensitive data so you can plan accordingly.

The one piece of advice we give most often to our clients contemplating a move to the cloud – or any application modernization effort for that matter – is take a long hard look at their applications and the associated data.

Start by understanding your business requirements and then determine your technology capabilities so you can balance the two. Then look at your data to ensure you understand what you have, where it is, how it is used and by whom. Only with answers to these questions can you plan and executive a successful move to the cloud.

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Enterprise Architect: A Role That Keeps Evolving

Enterprise architect is a common job title within IT organizations at large companies, but the term lacks any standard definition. Ask someone on the business side what their organization’s enterprise architects do, and you’ll likely get a response like, “They work with IT,” which is true, but also pretty vague.

What the enterprise architects at your organization do depends in large part on how the IT department is organized. At some organizations, enterprise architects work closely with the software applications in a role that some might refer to as a solution architect.

In other organizations, the role of enterprise architect might carry more traditional IT responsibilities around systems management. Other enterprise architects, especially at large organizations, might specialize in exploring how emerging technologies can be tested and later integrated into the business.

Technology research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that enterprise architects will increasingly move into an internal consultancy function within large organizations. While this use of the role is not currently widespread, it’s easy to see how it could make sense for some businesses.

If, for example, a business sets a goal to increase its website sales by 20 percent in one year’s time, meeting that goal will require that different IT and business functions work together.

The business side might tackle changes to the marketing plan and collect data about website visitors and shoppers, but ultimately they will need to collaborate with someone on the technology side to discuss how IT can help reach that goal. And that’s where an enterprise architect in the role of an internal consultant comes into play.

Each business is going to organize its enterprise architects in a way that best serves the organization and helps achieve its goals.

That’s one of the reasons the enterprise architect role has no standard definition. Most teams consist of members with broad IT experience, but each member will often have some role-specific knowledge. One team member might specialize in security, for example, and another in applications.

Like the tech industry in general, the only constant in enterprise architecture is change. Roles and titles will continue to evolve, and as the business and IT sides of the organization continue to come together in the face of digital transformation, how these teams are organized, where they report, and the types of projects they focus on are sure to change over time.

Enterprise integration architect is one role in enterprise architecture that’s on the rise. These architects specialize in integrating the various cloud and on-premise systems that are now common in the hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures powering the modern enterprise.

Enterprise Architect: A Role That Keeps Evolving

For the Enterprise Architect, Business Experience Becomes a Valuable Commodity

Regardless of the specific title, enterprise architects need the ability to work with both their business and IT colleagues to help improve business outcomes. As enterprise architecture roles move closer to the business, those with business knowledge are becoming valuable assets. This is especially true for industry-specific business knowledge.

As industry and government compliance regulations, for example, become part of the business fabric in industries like financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, many enterprise architects are developing specializations in these industries that demonstrate their understanding of the business and IT sides of these regulations.

This is important because compliance permeates every area of many of these organizations, from the enterprise architecture to the business processes, and today it’s all enabled by software. Compliance is another area where Gartner’s internal consultancy model for enterprise architects could benefit a number of organizations. The stakes are simply too high to do anything but guarantee all of your processes are compliant.

Enterprise architect is just one role in the modern organization that increasingly stands with one foot on the business side and the other in IT. As your organization navigates its digital transformation, it’s important to use tools that can do the same.

erwin, Inc.’s industry-leading tools for enterprise architecture and business process modeling use a common repository and role-based views, so business users, IT users and those who straddle the line have the visibility they need. When everyone uses the same tools and the same data, they can speak the same language, collaborate more effectively, and produce better business outcomes. That’s something the whole team can support, regardless of job title.

Business Process Modeling Use Cases

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The Data Governance (R)Evolution

Data governance continues to evolve – and quickly.

Historically, Data Governance 1.0 was siloed within IT and mainly concerned with cataloging data to support search and discovery. However, it fell short in adding value because it neglected the meaning of data assets and their relationships within the wider data landscape.

Then the push for digital transformation and Big Data created the need for DG to come out of IT’s shadows – Data Governance 2.0 was ushered in with principles designed for  modern, data-driven business. This approach acknowledged the demand for collaborative data governance, the tearing down of organizational silos, and spreading responsibilities across more roles.

But this past year we all witnessed a data governance awakening – or as the Wall Street Journal called it, a “global data governance reckoning.” There was tremendous data drama and resulting trauma – from Facebook to Equifax and from Yahoo to Aetna. The list goes on and on. And then, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect, with many organizations scrambling to become compliant.

So where are we today?

Simply put, data governance needs to be a ubiquitous part of your company’s culture. Your stakeholders encompass both IT and business users in collaborative relationships, so that makes data governance everyone’s business.

Data Governance is Everyone's Business

Data governance underpins data privacy, security and compliance. Additionally, most organizations don’t use all the data they’re flooded with to reach deeper conclusions about how to grow revenue, achieve regulatory compliance, or make strategic decisions. They face a data dilemma: not knowing what data they have or where some of it is—plus integrating known data in various formats from numerous systems without a way to automate that process.

To accelerate the transformation of business-critical information into accurate and actionable insights, organizations need an automated, real-time, high-quality data pipeline. Then every stakeholder—data scientist, ETL developer, enterprise architect, business analyst, compliance officer, CDO and CEO—can fuel the desired outcomes based on reliable information.

Connecting Data Governance to Your Organization

  1. Data Mapping & Data Governance

The automated generation of the physical embodiment of data lineage—the creation, movement and transformation of transactional and operational data for harmonization and aggregation—provides the best route for enabling stakeholders to understand their data, trust it as a well-governed asset and use it effectively. Being able to quickly document lineage for a standardized, non-technical environment brings business alignment and agility to the task of building and maintaining analytics platforms.

  1. Data Modeling & Data Governance

Data modeling discovers and harvests data schema, and analyzes, represents and communicates data requirements. It synthesizes and standardizes data sources for clarity and consistency to back up governance requirements to use only controlled data. It benefits from the ability to automatically map integrated and cataloged data to and from models, where they can be stored in a central repository for re-use across the organization.

  1. Business Process Modeling & Data Governance

Business process modeling reveals the workflows, business capabilities and applications that use particular data elements. That requires that these assets be appropriately governed components of an integrated data pipeline that rests on automated data lineage and business glossary creation.

  1. Enterprise Architecture & Data Governance

Data flows and architectural diagrams within enterprise architecture benefit from the ability to automatically assess and document the current data architecture. Automatically providing and continuously maintaining business glossary ontologies and integrated data catalogs inform a key part of the governance process.

The EDGE Revolution

 By bringing together enterprise architecture, business process, data mapping and data modeling, erwin’s approach to data governance enables organizations to get a handle on how they handle their data and realize its maximum value. With the broadest set of metadata connectors and automated code generation, data mapping and cataloging tools, the erwin EDGE Platform simplifies the total data management and data governance lifecycle.

This single, integrated solution makes it possible to gather business intelligence, conduct IT audits, ensure regulatory compliance and accomplish any other organizational objective by fueling an automated, high-quality and real-time data pipeline.

The erwin EDGE creates an “enterprise data governance experience” that facilitates collaboration between both IT and the business to discover, understand and unlock the value of data both at rest and in motion.

With the erwin EDGE, data management and data governance are unified and mutually supportive of business stakeholders and IT to:

  • Discover data: Identify and integrate metadata from various data management silos.
  • Harvest data: Automate the collection of metadata from various data management silos and consolidate it into a single source.
  • Structure data: Connect physical metadata to specific business terms and definitions and reusable design standards.
  • Analyze data: Understand how data relates to the business and what attributes it has.
  • Map data flows: Identify where to integrate data and track how it moves and transforms.
  • Govern data: Develop a governance model to manage standards and policies and set best practices.
  • Socialize data: Enable stakeholders to see data in one place and in the context of their roles.

If you’ve enjoyed this latest blog series, then you’ll want to request a copy of Solving the Enterprise Data Dilemma, our new e-book that highlights how to answer the three most important data management and data governance questions: What data do we have? Where is it? And how do we get value from it?

Solving the Enterprise Data Dilemma

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What Are Customer Journey Architects, and Do You Need One?

Customer journey architects are becoming more relevant than ever before.

For businesses that want to make improvements, enterprise architecture has long been a tried and tested technique for mapping out how change should take place.

Continue reading “What Are Customer Journey Architects, and Do You Need One?”