EA Stakeholders
Superior roles in collaboration
In an aim to coordinate the business and IT domains’ alignment, besides in an effort to support the organization’s strategic initiative (Abraham & Aier, 2012), the Enterprise Architect is anticipated to interact with the following superior roles within the organization:
The CEO / Top Organizational Leader
Zachman (1996) states in his research that the organizational change is a major challenge for the contemporary organization. Consequently the efficient Chief Executive Officer (CEO) / Top organizational leader should consider EA as an organizational resource and strategic capability as key to business success (The Open Group, 2011). Sessions (2007) illustrates a business case where the responsible top organizational leader involves an architect to evaluate and consider the consequences of the large-scale change program, prior to a final decision to run the project.
The CFO
Uhl & Gollenia (2012) describe Chief Financial Officer’s (CFO) main interest as conducting the prerequisites for the well-performing organization, utilizing the minimum of resources and maximizing outcome with a great interest in business transformations. The role as CFO has according to Hommel (2012) evolved in recent years, where the role will cover strategic and operational issues, and involving consequence in risk evaluation for the business.
The CIO
Strano & Rehmani (2007) depicting the Chief Information Officer (CIO) as the key role to ensure that values and benefits from IS/IT investments are to be fulfilled while in the same context the Enterprise Architect is particularly considered to identify and consider the approaching IS/IT investments with an aim to correspond the IS/IT standards with the business strategy. The CIO is an important player to collaborate with other C-levels, argues Weinzimer (2015), upon fortifying these values and benefits derived from EA.
The CTO
GAO (2006) describes the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in contributing to the EA development mainly to identify opportunities and risks emanating from the technology with an impact on the business. Further on, the CTO role is intended to coordinate the technology environment involving the business strategy derived from the technology (GAO, 2006).
The COO
Dumas et al. (2013) define the Chief Operations (Operating) Officer (COO) as the role to define how the organization will organize its operations. In addition, it is common that the COO is responsible for the outcome of the business processes performance. Murer et al. (2011) add the responsibility of resource planning, risk management, and the project portfolio to the COO role. Kickul & Lyons (2012) supplement the responsibility of quality topics and the progress in a supply chain, involving partners and suppliers for a smooth operation output.
Related architect roles in collaboration
According to Steghuis & Proper (2008) the Information Architect, the Process Architect, the IT Architect, the Software Architect, the Application Architect, are present in the arena of IT Management. Roeleven & Broer (2009) found EA roles more diversified and more common in large businesses in comparison to the small or mid-sized organizations while the most common role is the Business Architect. In addition, Wieringa et al. (2009) have identified the Data Architect, the Technical Infrastructure Architect and the Network Architect and IASA (2012) adds the Solution Architect to the list of common architect roles in collaboration.
The Business Architect
The Business Architect is intended to gathering business needs from the organization, translating strategies into a delivery-focused transition, where the business architecture is core (Whelan & Meaden, 2012; Wysocki, 2011).
The Information Architect
The Information Architect is supposed to be conscious of the socio-technical impact from data and information, involving aspects as technological, cultural and social (Resmini, 2014).
The IT Architect
The IT architect is focusing the Information Technology in general and will assist the Enterprise Architect on integrational subjects while the Enterprise Architect guides the IT architect on focusing business value (The Open Group, 2011).
The Data Architect
The Data Architect deals with the structure of data in use by the applications, supporting the business in order to process, store and visualize data (Snoeck, 2014).
The Big Data Architect
The Big Data Architect is emanating from the data architect, but has revealed advanced analytical skills, involving the technical understanding and business knowledge, which has been considered as a rare talent by Grossman & Ross (2012).
The Solution Architect
The Solution Architect assignment is to guide the realization of IT solutions based on the business needs, comprising several systems. The Solution Architect is intended to mature frameworks on how-to knowledge about the architectural frameworks building blocks (Zimmermann & Miksovic, 2012).
Other universal stakeholders in collaboration
Since the evolution of a customer-centric focus has started, the Enterprise Architect is intended to collaborate with new roles, emerging to support the future to come, in parallel with the existing, conventional roles such as:
The Program / Project Manager (PM)
The PM is, relating the size of the project, responsible to accomplish a project on time, within budget and the project’s scope (Wysocki, 2011).
The Business Relationship Manager (BRM)
The role of the BRM is to coordinate the needs and requests from customers with various services, delivered by external and internal service providers (Brewster, 2014). The architect collaborates closely with this position in an aim to fine-tune the concept of BRM.
The Chief Data Officer (CDO)
The CDO is responsible for the business’ master data management and its quality that involve big data and business intelligence platforms (Luisi, 2014). Since ownership and data are seen as an asset and necessary to maintain, the architects will share the overall EA aspects with CDO.
The Chief Customer Officer (CCO)
The CCO is focusing the prerequisites in delivery of a decent customer experience to increase competitive advantages (Luisi, 2014), where the CCO will interact with the architect to support this function.
In this multi-disciplinary work field of the Enterprise Architect, there is a request for collaborative skills, innovative thinking, and co-creation, alignment, and respect of colleague’s contextual environment in language, cultures, and organizational memberships, among others. The architect is intended to understand and resolve circumstances at different organizational levels, where the very each requires knowledge and attention to the distinct condition and its environment. The next section explores the Enterprise Architect as profession.
Page references:
Hommel, U. (2012). The strategic CFO: creating value in a dynamic market environment. Heidelberg; Berlin: Springer.
IASA. (2012). IT-relaterade arkitektroller i Sverige. http://www.iasa.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IASA-Arkitektroller-2012.pdf
Resmini, A. (2014). Reframing information architecture. Cham: Springer.