Solution Architects in an Organization

A solution architect understands the needs and goals of an organization. Often, solution architects work for the organization as part of a team. All stakeholders, processes, teams, and organization management affect solution architect roles and their work. In this chapter, you will learn and understand the solution architect role and how solution architects fit within the organization. Following that, you will learn about the various types of solution architect and how they coexist in an organization. You may need a generalist solution architect and other specialist solution architects, depending on your project's complexity.

This chapter will provide details on the solution architect's responsibility and how it can impact an organization's success. A solution architect wears multiple hats and business executives heavily depend on their experience and decision-making to understand their technical vision.

The solution-and-software development methodology has evolved over the last few decades, from waterfall to agile, which a solution architect needs to adopt. This chapter will provide details about the Agile methodology and the iterative approach that a solution architect should take for the continuous improvement of solution delivery. Overall, agile thinking is very important for a solution architect.

In addition to solution design, solution architects need to handle various constraints to evaluate risk and plan risk mitigation. Also, quality management plays a significant role, which shouldn't be overlooked. The solution architect plays an essential role throughout the solution's life cycle (from requirement collection, solution design, and solution implementation to testing and launch).

A solution architect needs to engage regularly post-launch to ensure the scalability, high availability, and maintainability of the solution. For broader consumer products, the solution architect also needs to work with the sales team as a technology evangelist of the product through content publishing and public speaking in various forums.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

Types of solution architect role
Solution architect responsibilities
Solution architects in an agile organization

Types of solution architect role

In the previous chapter, you learned about solution architecture and how various stakeholders impact solution strategies. Now, let's understand the solution architect's role. The software solution can develop without a solution architect, depending on the project's size, but for a large project, it is a requirement to have a dedicated solution architect. The success and failure of the plan depends on the solution architect.

There is always a need for someone who can make architectural decisions for the team and drive team collaboration with stakeholders. Sometimes, it is required to have multiple solution architects in the team, depending on the size of the project.

The different types of solution architect are depicted in the following diagram, showing how they have different self-differentiating responsibilities in the organization:

Types of solution architect

As shown in the preceding diagram, an organization can have multiple types of solution architect. Solution architects can be categorized as generalists or specialists. Generalist solution architects have the breadth that comes from multiple technical domains. Specialist solution architects have very in-depth knowledge in their area of expertise, such as big data, security, or networking. A generalist solution architect needs to collaborate with a specialist solution architect, to align with the project's requirements and complexity.

The role of a solution architect varies from organization to organization and you may encounter a variety of job titles related to solution architect, the most common being generalist solution architect roles. Their focuses are as follows:

Enterprise solution architect:
- Organization strategy
- Business architecture
Solution architect:
- Solution design
- Solution integration
Technical architect:
- Software design
- Software development
Cloud architect:
- Cloud strategy
- Cloud migration
Architect evangelist:
- Platform adoption
- Technical content

There may be other titles (such as application architect and software architect); however, this depends on the organization's structure.

Specialist solution architect roles are as follows:

Infrastructure architect:
- IT infrastructure design
- Software standardization and patching
Network architect:
- Network design
- IT network strategy and latency
Data architect:
- Data engineering and analysis
- Data science and data intelligence

Security architect:
- Cyber security
- IT compliance
DevOps architect:
- IT automation
- Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD)

There may be other types of specialist solution architect, such as migration architect and storage architect. This, again, depends on the organization's structure. As per the project and organizational complexity, a solution architect can take on multiple roles or different solution architects can have overlapping responsibilities. You will learn more about each architect role in the subsequent sections.

Enterprise solution architect

Do you ever think about how products launch in the information technology industry? This is where the enterprise solution role comes into the picture – they define best practices, culture, and suitable technologies. An enterprise architect works closely with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and management to identify organizational strategies for information technology and make sure that their knowledge aligns with company business rules.

Enterprise architects handle solution design across the organization; they create long-term plans and solutions with stockholders and leadership. One of the most important aspects is to finalize which technologies should be used by the company and making sure the company is using these technologies with consistency and integrity.

Another important aspect of the enterprise architect is defining the business architecture. In some organizations, you may see a business architect as the job title. Business architecture fills the gap between organizational strategy and its successful execution. It helps convert a map strategy into executable action items and takes this to a tactical level for implementation.

Overall, enterprise architects are more aligned with company visions and responsibilities when it comes to defining organization-wide standards for the successful implementation of the business' vision.

Solution architect

In general, this book explores the role of a solution architect in a more generic way. Still, you often see solution architects with different titles, as per the organization's structure, for example, enterprise solution architect, software architect, or technical architect. In this section, you will find some distinct attributes related to the various titles. However, the responsibilities of the solution architect overlap, depending on an organization's structure.

If you wish to know how a solution should be organized and delivered, then a solution architect plays an essential role in this context. A solution architect designs the overall system and how different systems integrate across different groups. A solution architect defines the expected outcome by working with business stakeholders and providing a clear understanding of the delivery objective on the part of the technical team.

The solution architect connects the dots across the organization and ensures consistency within different teams to avoid any last-minute surprises. The solution architect engages throughout the project life cycle and also defines monitoring and alerting mechanisms to ensure smooth operations after a product's launch. The solution architect also plays an essential role in project management by providing advice regarding resource, cost, and timeline estimation.

Overall, the solution architect gets to engage on a more tactical level compared to the enterprise architect. Sometimes, the solution architect takes on the role of an enterprise architect if a more strategic involvement is required.

Technical architect

A technical architect can also be called application architect or software architect. A technical architect is responsible for software design and development. The technical architect works with the organization in terms of engineering and is more focused on defining technical details for software development by a team. They also work across the organization to understand how integration will work alongside other parts of the software module, which may be managed by other groups.

A technical architect can manage the details of API design and define API performance and scaling aspects. They make sure that the software is being developed consistently with the organization's standards and that they can easily integrate with another component.

The technical architect is a point of contact for any technical question related to the engineering team and will have the ability to troubleshoot the system as required. For a small software development project, you may not see a technical architect role, as a senior engineer may take up that role and work on software architecture design.

The technical architect mentors and supports the software engineering team by working closely with them and resolving any hindrance that arises from cross-team integration or business requirements.