Solution Architect

Position Purpose

The Senior Solution Architect provides the necessary leadership, analysis and design tasks related to support the development of technology solutions to ensure that solutions meet business needs and align with architectural governance and standards.  They will engage in the project delivery lifecycle at different levels, which will range from IT triage, to early shaping, to solution delivery or end to end including providing design assurance. They will contribute to the development of the Architecture practice, including architectural standards, principles, templates and forums.

Key Accountabilities:

Translates Business Strategy into Solutions Architecture

• Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise system designs and change requirements to drive the organization's targeted business outcomes.
• Understands emerging technology trends and disruptions and the practical application of existing, new, and emerging technologies to enable new and evolving business and operating models.
• Translates business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work.
• Analyses the technology industry, competitors and market trends, and determines their potential impact on the enterprise.
• Provides deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to help the architecture review board (ARB) assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on the business and IT estate.
• Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes.

Leads Solutions Design and Analysis

• Leads evaluation, design and analysis for the implementation of a solutions architecture across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise standards.
• Creates architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects and systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information).
• Creates reference architectures focused on detailed design principles, decision points, detailed APIs, major systems and dependencies between business and IT. 
• Analyses the business-IT environment (run, grow and transform the business) to detect critical deficiencies, legacy and technical debt, and recommends solutions for improvement (systems of record, differentiation and innovation).

Orchestrates Solutions Delivery

• Working hand-in-hand with project managers and business analysts, designs and directs the governance activities associated with ensuring solutions architecture assurance and compliance. 
• Defines the principles, guidelines, standards and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the enterprise's future-state architecture vision.
• Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations.
• Supports product managers in EOL (end of life) product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire products, services or systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information).
• Develops a roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise application portfolio from future to current state (as defined by the solutions architecture).
• Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements.
• Identifies the organizational impact (for example, on skills, processes, structures or culture) and financial impact of the solutions architecture.

Facilitates and Collaborates to Deliver Business Outcomes

• Works closely with the project delivery team and portfolio management office (PMO) to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised throughout the project or product lifecycle.
• Works closely with the product owners and product managers to ensure a robust architectural runway that can support future business requirements throughout the product lifecycle.
• Provides consulting support to architects within agile teams  to ensure the project or product is aligned with the overall enterprise architecture. 
• Consults with application and infrastructure development projects and products to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture and identify when it is necessary to modify projects to accommodate the solutions architecture.
• Supports a community of practice (CoP), guiding and helping  agile teams, product owners, and application architects to align with the overall enterprise architecture governance and assurance. 

Key Relationships:

Internal:

• Reports to Lead Solution Architect
• Delivery Organisation (Project Managers, Platform Teams)
• Architecture team members
• Business Stakeholders/SMEs, Product Owners, PMO

External:

• Technology vendors, partners