What does an Enterprise Architect do?

When an enterprise wants to improve its operations and streamline productivity or labor resources, it might hire an enterprise architect to achieve those goals. Rather than focusing on the day-to-day business of an enterprise, this architect usually analyzes some layer of the enterprise's structure, with the hope of improving operations. Most of the time, the main concerns of an enterprise architect are the information technology used within an enterprise, the information and data being generated by that enterprise and the operational labor structure of the enterprise.

Expertise is required to sustain the integration of complex information technologies within an enterprise. For instance, a school aiming to increase teacher correspondence might want to give all of its teachers laptops that connect to a central server, and an enterprise architect might be responsible for making this happen. Besides the physical technology, implementing this system probably would require a well-conceived plan and long-term technology use strategies. In order to effectively integrate this technology, an enterprise architect might also be expected to train staff members or help build the initial frame of a new system. This might include the introduction of software, hardware or information systems as well as the constant analysis and improvement of those systems.

An enterprise architect might also focus on collecting and analyzing data generated by a company. Examples of this could be the number of emails sent or the bandwidth used by an enterprise's operations in the course of a year. The purpose of focusing on this sort of data management and analysis is often to find weak points in the frame where improvements could be made and operations could be reworked to streamline efficiency. Furthermore, an enterprise architect might be asked to provide expertise on the information generated by a company, turning complex frameworks into common language concepts.

Outside of technology management and systems implementation, an enterprise architect might be responsible for analyzing and improving the underlying organization of the workforce structure of an enterprise. For instance, a retail store needs managers, manual laborers and sales associates to operate, and they are managed within an operational framework. An enterprise architect might be responsible for monitoring and improving the organization of these workers, most likely with the goal of streamlining efficiency and productivity. Similar to implementing information technology systems, careful analysis of the workers requires collecting data and considering a multitude of variables.