This role is responsible for Business Line or Business Domain level IT architectures, being involved in all the significant decisions regarding structure, behavior, interfaces, constraints and trade-offs at the business line or business domain level.
The business domain or business line architect has overall responsibility for architecture for a business domain or
business line respectively. This includes identifying and documenting the architecturally significant aspects of
the business domain or line.
The rationale for the main architecture decisions have to be the result of finding the right balance between
competing factors, including the concerns of various stakeholders, risks, constraints and technologies. The models
developed and decisions made need be agreed upon, validated and communicated to all the interested parties at the
business domain level.
A person acting in this role must be a good facilitator and have excellent communication skills. The IT
architect also needs to have the ability to comprehend and makes sense of a large body of knowledge (i.e. IT
technologies and the business as well) and create the IT architecture models that capture
this information. Excellent knowledge of the business domain or business line is therefore essential, along
with an extensive knowledge of IT technologies. The line/domain architect needs to be familiar with the tools used to
capture the models of the architecture and with the main technological aspects of potential solutions.
A line/domain architect should be prepared to:
Assess the situation of the business domain/line;
Understand the domain's or line's requirements, strategies and goals;
Understand the current enterprise architecture and business line architecture;
Facilitate and lead the modeling of the target domain/line architecture;
Discuss and facilitate a business re-engineering effort, if needed;
Understand the technical sides of the solutions;
Take part in defining IT architectures and solution approaches for resulting systems.
Assignment Approaches
Depending upon the size and scope of the enterprise, consider assigning the Enterprise Architect, and Domain or
Line Architect roles to the same person. However, in large organization with large business domains or business
line separate IT architects will be required.
Business Unit IT architecture responsibilities may also be assigned to the Business Line architect, depending upon the
size of the organization.
