H aving had the possibility to work with those that excel, and blunder in the field of architecture enabled me to see what the value of aligned architecture can do for enabling the business and the difference it makes in being able to achieve it's objective.

Architectural thinking, in my opinion, can therefore be described as "the process to transform business objectives, regulatory requirements and processes into IT support platforms" that enable the business to do just that.

Ideally the discipline of architectural thinking allows you to measuring the effectiveness and the existence of functional gaps of the business requirements in IT implementation and it's TCO, also known as the IT KPI Score Cards

Before going any further I could perhaps provide my view on the different disciplines in IT Architecture, the responsibilities that each of the groups has, and the skills needed from a architectural thinking perspective.

In my role as an enterprise architect

In this role one should have a level of understanding of the business that allows you to transform from the current state and build the next IT infrastructure with upper management that fits their vision and have the ability to "sell" the budget.

My IT skill should be sufficient to understand how the vision could be build and be able to transform the current IT landscape to facilitate it. While planing the transformation I would be doing this under an agreed top down budget and I will generate among others:

I have demonstrated several times that I have a good understanding of the business and I excellent in my technology skills. This in combination to work well with C-level managers give me the ability to translate business objectives in to implementable and pragmatic information technology platforms that every one can feel comfortable with.


In my role as an the Solution Architect

Being able to understand the vision set by management and understand what needs to be developed for a given business stream helps as I am able to understand the vision/ problem faced and can design the relationships between the vision and IT solutions.

I understand the limitations of the various technology stacks and know how one needed to develop the most effective implementation of the identified value chain(s).

In my day-2-day will ideally identify the items impacted from the referenced business process models and Business Object Model further develop them and transform them into the Logical data model as well as class and service models facilitating for the new functionality.

As a Microsoft Certified Trainer, ITIL specialist, and with many years of experience I have amassed good Technology skills and a good understanding of the business capabilities developed.


In my role as the Application Architect

Having been developing software in basic age 9 till today you can understand that I have accumulated enough technology skills that I can call myself an expert. As an application architect I have enough modeling and technology skills that I was able to design several implementations for among others:

I have work as a product owner and I have a solid IT degree as well as a bachelor in accounting and finance.

As the application architect, among others, I will take the Class and logical Data Model and adapt it to the application's user and SLA requirements. Normally as application architect you also function as Lead Developer and interact with developers, business stakeholder and project manager. Most of the time the role doubles as requirements engineer and SCRUM master.

I Have expert technology skills and an understanding of the business needs that need to be implemented and ac translate business line management requirements to IT implementations that meets the SLA (Security, compliance, Recovery, and Training).