Who is Solution Architect: Processes, Role Description, Responsibilities, and Outcomes
Ankita Sharda
Senior Human Resource Executive || Hired for Adidas & KPMG (ex-clients) | MBA, Talent Acquisition- Corporate HR.
In a rapidly changing technology environment, organizations face the need to transform their processes and systems to meet emerging business requirements. This digital transformation demands a specific expertise and a set of practices to align business focus with technology solutions.
Solution architecture belongs to the list of most important practices executed before any tech solution development begins. In this article, we’ll discuss what solution architecture is, describe the role of a solution architect, and explain how the adoption of this practice can help solve business problems.
Solution architecture is a practice of designing, describing, and managing the solution engineering in relation to specific business problems.
A solution architect is the person in charge of leading the practice and introducing the overall technical vision for a particular solution.
While the practice can be managed in-house, there are companies that provide solution architecture consulting as a specific set of services.
Each of these terms includes multiple aspects that we’ll discuss in the article.
Enterprise architect vs solution architect vs technical architect
Enterprise architect. which we covered in a dedicated article, focuses on building complex enterprise ecosystems and solves high-level strategic issues. Enterprise architecture defines strategic directions of the business architecture, which then leads to an understanding of what technology facilities are needed to support that architecture.
Solution architect. Solution architecture (SA) is a complex process – with many sub-processes – that bridges the gap between business problems and technology solutions. It encompasses:
- Finding the best tech solution among all possible to solve the existing business problems.
- Describing the structure, characteristics, behavior, and other aspects of software to project stakeholders.
- Defining features, phases, and solution requirements.
- Providing specifications according to which the solution is defined, managed, and delivered.
Technical architect. A technical architect is mainly in charge of engineering problems and software architecture.
Some specifically add an infrastructure architect to the paradigm. This role becomes relevant for organizations that maintain complex hardware infrastructure in-house to support operations.
Solution architecture in the context of the enterprise and technical architecture
Solution architecture describes how different components of business, information, and technology architectures are used in a particular solution. As solution architecture is more focused on details and solution technologies to address a specific business problem, it provides a channel between enterprise architecture and technical architecture. The latter is focused only on technical issues. An effective approach for companies is combining enterprise architecture activities with solution and technical architecture activities