Domain architect and Enterprise architect

The TOGAF standard requires large enterprises to have an Architectural Practice consisting of Domain Architects, Enterprise Architects, Chief Architect and an Architecture Board. Let's break down who is who and what the roles and powers of each should be.

Domain architects according to TOGAF coincide with 4 domains in TOGAF:

1. Business domain
2. Application, subpart of IT domain
3. Data, subpart of IT domain
4. Technology domain

Thus, the following roles belong to the domain Architects: 

1. Business architect is a business analyst for a particular module (e.g. Controlling) with 5 to 10 years of experience. Very good business architects are people from the business who have performed these operations themselves for many years. To become an Architect it is a prerequisite that you have proven 5 years of experience in your field. Business architects usually lead a team of business analysts who draw the business processes. A total of 4 levels of business processes are drawn as a flow of operations with process owners and hierarchy levels within the enterprise. If everything is drawn correctly, e.g. in ARIS, the finished organisational structure can be uploaded. All processes must be aligned to the strategy and to each other. It is best practice to first build the strategy of the company and based on that the business processes. The result of work business-architect - is drawn business processes in ARIS and keeping them up to date, as the company's business is constantly changing, respectively, and changing business processes. This is very important as it is part of the change management process in the architecture.
2. Solution architect is an architect who analyses the processes received from the business architect and builds heating maps for them. A heating map is a traffic light that is drawn against each process, usually level 2 or 3, whether and to what extent the business process is covered by the IT system. As a result of this work, the solution architect draws the current solution architecture and the target architecture. The target architecture is quite difficult to draw, because you need to know all the solutions on the market to cover certain processes. Often, manufacturing plants have their own individual characteristics in the way they handle the production process and here too, it is important to know the industrial solutions and have the skills to quickly learn such solutions, even if you haven't encountered them before. The difference between these two pictures (current and target) is the digital transformation that the company is facing and eventually turns into a portfolio of projects to bring to the Architectural Committee for decision making.
3. Data architect is a fairly new role in companies, as it used to be performed by business analysts. This architect is responsible for all of the company's master data: it gathers all the directories, arranges them and analyses the systems in terms of avoiding duplication of master data in different systems. This architect is responsible for all the company's master data: it collects all the directories, designs them and analyses the systems in terms of avoiding duplication of master data in different systems. This architect is very important for integration processes. Integration is the main reason for failure of most systems implementation, so it is very important to have an experienced, pedantic and thoughtful person in this role. The result of the work of the Data Architect - is the data architecture that tells exactly what system will store the master data directory and which systems will distribute this directory, in addition, he describes how data exchange will occur between systems, in technical language.
4. IT Architect is a system administrator with 5 to 10 years of experience in implementing and building IT infrastructure for the target enterprise architecture, which comes to him from the Solution Architect. The result of this architect's work is a mapped out current and target infrastructure architecture (which servers with which capacities, which cloud solutions and which storage systems will operate in the future and how they will be interconnected)

Enterprise Architects

Unlike Domain architects, Enterprise Architect is an architect that focuses on the company's overall strategy and models the current and target architecture for the company as a whole. Enterprise Architect works with all domain architects depending on the domain. In global companies, there are several Enterprise Architects. Often, they are divided into the following areas:

- Sales and Marketing,

- Supply chain,

- Back office (Finance and HR, IT, Legal, Sustainability),

- Big data and AI

The main task of the Enterprise Architect is to create a clear vision of the target data architecture with all interfaces. After this modelling, a roadmap is built and project management is performed. During the implementations, the Enterprise Architect will align all project documents with the approved target data architecture, and make changes to the current models in its direction in the simulation tool.

Enterprise Architect is also responsible for master data, and here she works closely with the data architects, who provide a set of master data for each individual application's RDBMS. Enterprise Architect analyses all master data against the developed target data architecture and determines the data flow (where the master system that will distribute this master data to other systems should be).

Enterprise architect is higher in the organization hierarchy than domain architect, because this person usually works with the CEO-1 level of top management and has an ability to offer the targeting operating model for the whole company. 

In the next article I will write about the work of the Chief Architect and Architecture Board in global companies.