Brandon Werner

I created the following slide on typical architecture roles and I thought I’d share it.

Typical Architecture Team

Enterprise Architects

Primary role is to manage large scale product and process integrations and determine which products and processes are best suited to deliver on business requirements. They control the large picture of how everything works in an organization and maintains this in a centralized location. They should be experts in software and enterprise design methodologies with experience in how large systems interact and manage data. These architects are essential to competitive and cost-effective decision making and use of technologies.

Water-Cooler Talk: The latest research in to The Staged Event-Driven Architecture for Highly Concurrent Server Applications

Integration Architects

This is an emerging role in larger companies that have large and complicated deployments, particularly around Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). They are usually the ones that have the task of managing Business Processes. Put simply, they tie the software platforms the Software Architect designs together on the environments the Enterprise Architects deliver and purchase. Although Enterprise Architects are typically restricted to existing thinking and technology products, it is the combination of Integration and Software Architects that differentiate an organization and provide maximum benefit.

Water-Cooler Talk: How to change the business workflow so that they can be quicker than their competitors. May need to talk to the Software Architects about how the platform can be changed for quicker processing too.

Software Architects

Primary role is to take architectural directions and artifacts and produce and manage a software platform that provides strategic and operational advantage to an organization. They are usually the ones who maintain the core frameworks of an organization and are considered the gurus of whatever technology they design for. They are very important as they tend to add order and discipline to projects and ensure that best practices, appropriate abstraction and code re-use occurs. These architects are essential to good outsourcing of software development, especially near-shore and off-shore.

Water-Cooler Talk: The latest research in to how Dependency Injection in Java 5 eliminates the need for the Composite Entity pattern in enterprise development.

Gartner came out with a good podcast of one of their sessions from the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit. It is a very informative panel discussion about “Lessons Learned From the Trenches” with SOA/Enterprise Architecture. Anyone who is an Enterprise Architect or Technology/Business Executive embracing the change and possibilities of SOA in their organization will want to give it a listen. Chances are very good you’ll be vigorously nodding your head and maybe even feeling a little bit better about yourself knowing you are not alone in dealing with these problems.

Much of the conversation is about how to drive SOA adoption (it appears relying on developers to browse a repository is not working), how to measure cost benefits and savings to an organization (hint: measure your service reuse) and how they approach funding services which may not have an exact business advocate and therefore pocketbook to work against.

The last piece comes up all the time in organizations implementing a service oriented architecture. There are many business areas that would benefit from a high level “business service” which would result from the orchestration through externalized business logic (BPM/BPEL) of lower level “technology services”. Yet, if asked who would fund these lower level technology services so that the business services can emerge, the money dries up. Many take on the model of “first to need, first to pay” but that only works when the technology services and service orchestration aren’t that expensive. It’s hard to get project specific business users to fund enterprise wide services for the “greater good”. It’s something that has yet to be solved.

Here is the link.