This role is responsible for Business Unit or Project level IT architectures, being involved in all the significant decisions regarding structure, behavior, interfaces, constraints and trade-offs at the business unit or project level.
The business unit or project IT architect has overall responsibility for architecture for a business unit or
implementation project respectively. This includes identifying and documenting the architecturally significant aspects
of the business unit or project system.
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) and create the IT architecture models that capture this
information. Excellent knowledge of the business unit (and business line) is therefore essential, along with an
extensive knowledge of IT technologies. The unit/project IT 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/unit;
Understand the domain's or project's requirements, strategies and goals;
Understand the current enterprise architecture and business line architecture;
Facilitate and lead the modeling of the target unit/project 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 business line, 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.
Also, Business Unit IT architectures may be the responsibility of the Business Line architect. However, Project
Architects are definitely separate roles, but a Project Architect may be responsible for multiple projects.
