What is IT architecture?

Most of today's infrastructure landscapes are the result of a history of application implementation projects that brought in their own specialized hardware and infrastructure components. Mergers and acquisitions have made matters worse, leaving many organizations with multiple sets of the same infrastructure services that are difficult to interconnect, let alone integrate and consolidate.

Organizations benefit from infrastructure architecture when they want to be more flexible and agile because a solid, scalable, and modular infrastructure provides a solid foundation for agile adaptations. The market demands a level of agility that can no longer be supported by infrastructures that are inconsistent and difficult to scale. We need infrastructures built with standardized, modular components. And to make infrastructures consistent and aligned with business needs, architecture is critical.

Architecture is the philosophy that underlies a system and defines its purpose, intent, and structure. Different areas of architecture can be defined, including business architecture, enterprise architecture, data architecture, application architecture, and infrastructure architecture. Each of these areas has certain unique characteristics, but at their most basic level, they all aim to map IT solutions to business value.

Architecture is needed to govern an infrastructure as it is designed, as it is used, and as it is changed. We can broadly categorize architects into three groups: enterprise architects, domain architects, and solution architects, each with their own role.

Solution architects

Solution architects create IT solutions, usually as a member of a project team. A solution architect is finished when the project is complete. Solution architects are the technical conscience and authority of a project, are responsible for architectural decisions in the project, and work closely with the project manager.

Where the project manager manages the process of a project, the solution architect manages the technical solution of the project, based on business and technical requirements.

Domain architects

Domain architects are experts on a particular business or technology topic. Because solution architects cannot always be fully knowledgeable about all technological details or specific business domain issues, domain architects often assist solution architects on projects. Domain architects also support enterprise architects because they are aware of the latest developments in their field and can inform enterprise architects about new technologies and roadmaps. Examples of domain architects are cloud architects, network architects, and VMware architects.

Domain architects most often work for infrastructure or software vendors, where they help customers implement the vendor's technologies.

Enterprise architects

Enterprise architects continuously align an organization's entire IT landscape with the business activities of the organization. Using a structured approach, enterprise architects enable transformations of the IT landscape (including the IT infrastructure). Therefore, an enterprise architect is never finished (unlike the solution architect in a project, who is finished when the project is finished).

Enterprise architects typically work closely with the CIO and business units to align the needs of the business with the current and future IT landscape. Enterprise architects build bridges and act as advisors to the business and IT.

This entry was posted on Friday 31 January 2025