The Enterprise Architect is dead. Long live Enterprise Architecture!
Those of you who have been around the block in the IT architecture world will have seen and experienced the traditional two-tier architecture structure. This model has a team of Enterprise Architects who set out longer term strategy and wide reaching principles, with a number of solution architects closer to the business and delivery teams attempting to interpret and instantiate that strategy in the real world.
While this model encapsulates noble goals, in my experience there are many issues with it in practice. To be honest, I don’t think I have ever actually seen it work well.
I recently wrote an article about how I have tried to avoid the pitfalls of this two-tier approach when building the architecture practice at River Island.
You can find the article here:Â https://www.ritechstyle.com/news-insight/view/26/the-enterprise-architect-is-dead.aspx