Business Knowledge
To be successful, Enterprise Architects must have a sound understanding of the organisation they work for. This understanding includes general business knowledge, but also more specific knowledge related to the context the architect is operating within.
One such area of knowledge is of the specific industry the Architect's organisation falls under. Each industry has its own strengths and challenges, and an Enterprise Architecture for a financial service organisation, for instance, is in many ways quite different from one for a factory. It is important for an Enterprise Architect to be aware of trends in the industry, and to have an understanding of best practices and industry benchmarks: these very often form a baseline that can be used to assess the competitive strength of the business strategy and its translation into Enterprise Architecture.
On a more local level, a sound understanding of the enterprise itself is obviously needed. This includes knowledge and understanding of the particular market forces influencing the organisation, the way value is created inside and around it, and how the organisation sees and develops its competitive advantage. Whereas industry knowledge is largely concerned with how businesses are essentially the same, enterprise knowledge focuses on where these businesses are different and unique.
On this level, knowledge of legislative requirements for the business (such as those around privacy and data security) has become more and more important, with Governments increasingly enforcing compliance to privacy and data security laws and regulations. Failure to take legislative requirements into consideration when developing the Enterprise Architecture can cost an organisation dearly: not just by incurring legal actions against it, but also because compliance is much less expensive to realise when its principles and guidelines are part of the overall architecture than when it has to be 'bolted on' or 'engineered in' as an afterthought.
A third area of business knowledge required of an Enterprise Architect could be called the “executive domain”: the ability to look at a business in terms of its vision, strategy, market position and financial health. A good Enterprise Architect cannot just converse comfortably with the executive level about such matters, but has developed the ability to translate between the executive level and the Enterprise Architecture: turning vision and strategy into architectures and translating technological developments and trends into competitive advantages that strengthen (or sometimes re-direct) the vision and strategy.
Surprising as it may sound, research found that operational-level management capabilities are not necessarily part of being a good architect. Yet, Enterprise Architects do need to understand the operational culture of the organisation1 to be able to successfullly engage and support the end-users that are the ultimate clients of the systems delivered within the Enteprise Architecture framework. A failure to understand the operational level or properly engage end-users, including operational managers, in the design and realisation phases of IT development is often quoted as one of the main reasons so many IT projects fail to deliver value. We believe it is part of the Enterprise Architect's task to ensure that operational level considerations are fully integrated in the Architecture process.
