Architecture services are often baffling for people to understand. IT architecture tends to describe the design of information technology at the basic or structural level of an organization. The job of IT architects is similar to that of an architect that designs buildings, except they design computer systems and solutions. IT architecture of an enterprise uses a strategic approach to explain how the IT infrastructure services helps to accomplish company and strategic goals. The primary purpose of IT infrastructure is to lay the foundation for scalability, performance, modifiability, operability, security, and cost-effectiveness. Architecture services provide a basic framework upon which computer systems and solutions work and manifest or build new ones.
These architecture services comprise a set of principles, guidelines, protocols, and regulations which dictate the process of:
- Acquiring
- Building
- Configuring
- Modifying
- Interfacing
IT resources across the company. Equipment, software, communication, collaboration, development methodologies, tools and kits, modeling approaches, and organizational structures are a part of these IT resources. In short, IT architecture services provide a definitive and right technical solution for business processes that guarantee organizational success with the least amount of disruption.
Purpose of Enterprise IT Architecture Services
IT architecture services are the backbone of many business initiatives, including transformation, business innovation, and transition. It gives a roadmap to a company to manage, control, and adapt to changes and disruptions. These changes and disruptions are usually a result of market activities and the external environment. Enterprise architecture provides the basic framework and capability to deal with business operations and have a basic understanding of the functions. They focus on a structural and operational level. It also overlooks investments, governance, compliance, and assurance to facilitate the changes.
Having good and proactive enterprise architecture services enables businesses to respond to external changes and disruptions quickly and assess the level of these disruptions. For instance, architecture services managed the complexity and unprecedented level of impact businesses underwent during COVID-19. Businesses underwent disruptions, both economic and business, during the great pandemic. Architecture services managed these changes and disruptions to keep businesses and markets running.
Different Enterprise Architecture Services
Following are the different types of enterprise architecture services:
Enterprise Architecture Strategy & Planning
EA strategy and planning comprise different capabilities and IT infrastructures that can transform your business and drive innovation. These services also ensure the success of major business processes and technology initiatives.
Enterprise Architecture Implementation
Architecture implementation is the next big thing after strategy and planning, where technology architects help with the design, development, maintenance, and implementation of IT infrastructure. Technology architects demonstrate how to achieve goals and strategies and implement proper IT solutions.
Technical Architect as a Service
Technical architects as a service operate as an extended team that has multiple disciplines and capabilities. They work across different functions such as Azure app, identity management, access management, SQL server, etc. TAaaS is instrumental in decreasing the cost of maintenance and support of architectural resources.
Risk Identification and Management
One of the integral services of IT architects is to analyze, identify, and manage long and short-term risks of a company’s resources. These issues can potentially harm and seriously impact business activities and processes in the future. They have to evaluate risk every now and then to ensure the resources run optimally.
Benefits of Architecture Services
- Strategic alignment: they offer a complete overview of the company’s resources, including application and technology, from a strategic point of view.
- Manage complexity: carries out the necessary analysis of business processes, threats, opportunities, risks, and strengths.
- Process improvement: Highlights the need for improvement of processes. It also indicates the inevitability of capabilities for lean designs, processes, complex solutions, etc. Process improvement reflects in customer experience and the effectiveness of resources.
- Innovation enabler: as discussed, EA services enable change, transformation, and transition processes. This triggers the implementation of new technologies, initiatives, methodologies, and concepts such as AI, blockchain, and others that bring innovation.
Conclusion
Enterprise architecture services also optimize cost, increase return on investment, develop insights, and promote flexibility. These tend to standardize the business transformation process. EA also impacts change management.