At a recent social gathering, I landed up in a semi-serious chat around what is it that Enterprise Architects actually do. This is not an unexpected question, particularly, when you had just finished responding to the previous one -- "What do you do?". In fact, I had a rather quizy kind of a crowd - who, I think, were not that behind on technology but were not that familiar with architecture within an IT business.
No, I wouldn't go about describing all that here - just wanted to share my little takeaway from that evening. i.e. Be Prepared! Image is crucial to consultants. You never know, who you just met. Explaining something in short and simple language is not always easy. I was only there for a special "dinner" and as you can imagine, it soon turned into a long conversation of ideas, history, stakeholders, Enterprise, IT, business-IT alignment, transformation, IT jargons etc. and all kinds of things. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey talking through it and even listening to what people had to say or knew about all this. As you can imagine these conversations may well aid in preparing for a similar business situation. Try to Imagine -- what if, a potential customer asked the same set of questions to you in an elevator? what if one of your co-passengers in an airplane or train had an interest to know more about your area of work and what it means in the contexts of IT industry.
Another, key thing to keep as a one-liner is "we solve BUSINESS problems with IT". Try to keep some "business problems" to help them relate to. They usually fall into a few broad categories like:
- Reducing Costs
- Increase Operational Excellence
- Improving Customer Intimacy
- Increase Customer Value
- Increase Business Agility - adopt changes easily
For e.g. -- In a large, healthcare programme, one of our key goals were to "reduce waiting times for a patient waiting for consultation" .. This would improve "customer value" and deliver "operational efficiencies". Architects started analysing the healthcare busness processes that were involved in the delay. Enterprise and Business Architects worked on this part of it. They worked with the client's key partners, stakeholders to understand the current-state of the processes. Leading on, they gathered figures to guage the "process ineficiencies" in terms of cost, time, quality and volume. Finally, they derived future-state processes that aimed to reduce the waiting times. These re-modelled, future-state, processes were then enabled with appropriate technology solutions to achieve "speed" and efficiency, accurancy, security and scalability, leading to ultimately solve the business problem.
No, I wouldn't go about describing all that here - just wanted to share my little takeaway from that evening. i.e. Be Prepared! Image is crucial to consultants. You never know, who you just met. Explaining something in short and simple language is not always easy. I was only there for a special "dinner" and as you can imagine, it soon turned into a long conversation of ideas, history, stakeholders, Enterprise, IT, business-IT alignment, transformation, IT jargons etc. and all kinds of things. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey talking through it and even listening to what people had to say or knew about all this. As you can imagine these conversations may well aid in preparing for a similar business situation. Try to Imagine -- what if, a potential customer asked the same set of questions to you in an elevator? what if one of your co-passengers in an airplane or train had an interest to know more about your area of work and what it means in the contexts of IT industry.
Another, key thing to keep as a one-liner is "we solve BUSINESS problems with IT". Try to keep some "business problems" to help them relate to. They usually fall into a few broad categories like:
- Reducing Costs
- Increase Operational Excellence
- Improving Customer Intimacy
- Increase Customer Value
- Increase Business Agility - adopt changes easily
For e.g. -- In a large, healthcare programme, one of our key goals were to "reduce waiting times for a patient waiting for consultation" .. This would improve "customer value" and deliver "operational efficiencies". Architects started analysing the healthcare busness processes that were involved in the delay. Enterprise and Business Architects worked on this part of it. They worked with the client's key partners, stakeholders to understand the current-state of the processes. Leading on, they gathered figures to guage the "process ineficiencies" in terms of cost, time, quality and volume. Finally, they derived future-state processes that aimed to reduce the waiting times. These re-modelled, future-state, processes were then enabled with appropriate technology solutions to achieve "speed" and efficiency, accurancy, security and scalability, leading to ultimately solve the business problem.
Linking these stories back to your role (architect, designer, PM, developer, tester), would lead you explain, firstly what your role means and secondly, how organisations solve business problems with IT.
