The Architect has a Significant Role in Uplifting Digital Transformation

I can’t imagine guiding large-scale digital transformations without
knowledgeable and influential architects. Architects guide solutions, seek
standard practices, and target building extendable and reusable platforms
and services. Without architects, organizations add risk to their
implementations that can delay releasing capabilities, create integration
gaps, increase costs, and generate operational complexities.

First, here’s a little background on how I recommend organizing digital
transformation initiatives and where architects fit into the leadership
model. A product owner and agile team can lead the smaller initiatives, but
larger ones often require multiple agile teams working collaboratively. The
two primary leaders of large strategic initiatives are the
product manager, responsible for the vision and roadmap, and the
delivery leader,
who guides the solution architecture and delivers releases on time and
quality. Successful transformation requires a
collaboration between the product manager and delivery leader.

Key lieutenants or partners of the delivery leader are the architects,
including enterprise, solution, data, and security architects. Architects
help translate problems into solutions while defining non-functional
requirements (NFRs). They are key to helping agile, devops, data science,
and data governance teams create and support standardized solutions and
extendable platforms.

The architect’s role from vision to change management

In Digital Trailblazer, I describe the similarities between architect and product manager roles
because both require guiding teams through influence. I wrote, “Architects
must prototype with engineers using different technologies and
implementation approaches, formulating success criteria that help everyone
align on an execution strategy.”

Marko Anastasov, co-founder of
Semaphore CI/CD, agrees and says,
“Just as a ship needs its compass, Digital Trailblazers lean on architects
to navigate the uncharted waters of innovation.”

Let’s unpack the architect’s role and consider three example
responsibilities:

• The big picture – Jim Gochee, CEO at
  Blameless, says architects look
  at guiding the entire solution, not just the technology. “Digital
  transformation is complex and touches many systems,” he says. “Architects
  are your best bet for creating detailed migration plans that are broad,
  deep, and viable. Also, don’t forget that change is more than technology;
  it’s also people and process.”
• Domain-specific responsibilities – There are many types of
  architects, and Heather Sundheim, managing director of solutions
  engineering at SADA, shares specifics
  on the data architect’s role. “Data architects are essential in digital
  transformation, as data is at the heart of many initiatives,” she says.
  They organize and structure data to ensure it can be effectively used for
  analytics, AI, and informed decision-making. Data architects prioritize
  projects by evaluating their impact on data management, security, and
  compliance.”
• Influencing, teaching, and listening – Architects can’t live
  in ivory towers and dictate standards. They must get into the weeds to see
  what teams need to deliver solutions meeting today’s requirements while
  steering them toward supportable and extendable platforms. “Don’t overlook
  the importance of training in digital transformation,” says John Peebles,
  CEO at Administrate.
  “Training teams house some of the most valuable data about an
  organization’s potential, but that data is typically extremely siloed.
  Consider how you will access, standardize, and leverage training data.”

Architects must optimize their time around top-down strategy, bottom-up
working with stakeholders and agile teams, and in the weeds researching and
prototyping technologies.  

Architects’ responsibilities, measures, and activities in digital
transformation

In a recent
Coffee with Digital Trailblazers, a LinkedIn Audio Event that I host on Fridays at 11am ET, we discussed
the significant roles of architects in uplifting digital transformation.
I’ve broken them down below into responsibilities, activities, and
measures.

Digital Trailblazers!  Join us Fridays at 11am ET for a live audio discussion on digital
transformation topics:  innovation, product management, agile, DevOps,
data governance, and more!

Key responsibilities: What architects must deliver

• Gather actual requirements
  – Architects must listen beyond what customers, stakeholders, and
  end-users state or ask for – into the true requirements that will achieve
  the desired function and bring joy to its users.   
• Translate the what into many hows – In most situations, there isn’t
  one optimal architecture – there are solutions with benefits and
  tradeoffs. Top architects present multiple solution scenarios, technology
  buying options, and implementation partners. They seek differing opinions,
  devise POCs to validate assumptions, and provide recommendations.



• Minimize risks by influencing standards – Leave solutions to every
  self-organizing team without oversight or guidance, and you may get
  locally optimal solutions, but the enterprise will also end up with
  frankenarchitectures, a portfolio of costly technologies to maintain, siloed
  technical debt, and other operational risks. When architects influence teams toward
  standard technologies and practices, they are helping their organizations
  minimize long-term implementation risks and enable teams to deliver
  innovations faster.  
• Define the MVP of NFRs – If the product manager’s role is to define
  MVP features and capabilities, architects play a similar role in defining
  the MPV of non-functional requirements on performance, reliability, data
  governance, and security. They then prioritize incremental improvements,
  especially in areas impacting the business or exposing too much risk.



• Product management of the enterprise’s platform architecture – A
  most important responsibility is when enterprises seek standardized
  platforms, practices, technologies, and capabilities, hoping to reuse them
  as building blocks to accelerate the delivery of new products/services,
  lower support costs, and minimize risks. Architects should act as product
  managers on these solutions by identifying their target customers,
  defining a vision, and executing a capabilities roadmap.   

This isn’t an exhaustive list of responsibilities, but it can be a good way
to communicate and measure the effectiveness of architects working in DevOps
and data-driven organizations.

Recommended activities: What Digital Trailblazer architects do

I have a high bar and expectations of architects, and I fear the ones who
spend too much time on technology and not enough working with teams and
people. Chapter 4 of Digital Trailblazer is titled “Product Management and
Architecture: Trials and Triumphs,” and here’s the architectural
anti-pattern I shared in the chapter.

“There’s more fiction in an architectural drawing delivered via PowerPoint
than the best web designs concocted in Adobe Illustrator. And anyone who
has ever been hands‐on with any platform, system, or proprietary
application knows too many architectures defined by ivory tower enterprise
architects are complete fabrications. They look good. They make executives
feel like they are buying and building something achievable and
straightforward.” 

So, how can architects become
Digital Trailblazers? Here are some recommended activities we discussed during the Coffee with
Digital Trailblazers.

1. Walk in the end-users’ shoes to learn where technology provides value
2. Align the technical strategy to business outcomes through measurable KPIs
3. Explain technologies in simple terms and with minimal jargon
4. Communicate the technology vision multiple times in multiple ways so that
   people understand the why as much as the how 
5. Understand requirements before recommending a solution
6. Pause, listen, reflect, and solve the right challenges, find easy
   solutions for commodity problems
7. Develop business acumen and learn the language of this audience
8. Become a lifelong learner by reading, attending industry events, and
   sharing knowledge
9. Drive transparency and inclusiveness, especially when setting standards,
   selecting technologies, and prioritizing platform improvements
10. Be humble; an architect isn’t always the expert, and there’s much to learn
    from customers, teammates, and others

There are two themes across all ten activities: a focus on people and
communications. The best architects find researching technologies and
defining the solutions the easy part of their jobs and spend more time
interacting with people. 

Starting metrics: Architects in digital transformation

We didn’t get into a comprehensive list of metrics during the Coffee Hour,
but we did discuss several key targets that can be converted into metrics,
KPIs, or OKRs:

1. Minimize rework, redesign, and technical debt impacts
2. Reduce time to data and time to value
3. Mitigate risks through standards and platforms
4. ROI on reusable platforms and services
5. Utilization of centralized data assets, platforms, and microservices
6. Complexity and cost reduction by consolidating platforms and sunsetting
   legacy systems
7. Customer satisfaction of DevOps and data teams leveraging platform
   capabilities

Below is the interview I recorded about Chapter 4 of
Digital Trailblazer on product
management and architecture. I’ll cover more for architects in upcoming
posts, videos, and
Coffee with Digital Trailblazer
hours.  

Join us for a future session of
Coffee with Digital Trailblazers, where we discuss topics for aspiring transformation leaders. If you enjoy
my thought leadership, please sign up for the
Driving Digital Newsletter and read all about my transformation stories in
Digital Trailblazer.