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(imo) Solution Architects are popular in big enterprise environments exactly because the organisation as a whole doesn't use/isn't familiar with agile or the li

(imo) Solution Architects are popular in big enterprise environments exactly because the organisation as a whole doesn't use/isn't familiar with agile or the like. They have to figure out what solution the org is looking for, how to best integrate it with what they already have, and how to do it with the least impact on employees. If the org has poor information management, getting requirements is already a mess, and the SA is already screwed. From what I've seen (with contracted SAs), SAs are just inventorying and working around the half-finished implementations the previous SAs left behind, ad infinitum.

CapricornNoble 5y ago
>>>If the org has poor information management, getting requirements is already a mess, and the SA is already screwed. From what I've seen (with contracted SAs), SAs are just inventorying and working around the half-finished implementations the previous SAs left behind, ad infinitum. ^This has been my life for the past 5 years. I was the Information Management Officer for a military org with ~25,000 personnel, and our org suffered ~50% turnover in senior leadership EVERY SUMMER. It's been like groundhog day, every day. Operations personnel don't have the domain knowledge of the IT systems and Communications folks don't have the domain knowledge of the Operations, so neither side can put together a coherent, efficient architecture alone. The IMO is supposed to bridge that gap, focusing on documenting the business processes and helping to turn those into requirements, and possessing just enough IT systems knowledge to sanity-check the solutions proposed by the Communications staff. It's even harder to document the business processes when they are a) evolving b) rarely adhered to c) massive in breadth/scope. Sometimes the job entails telling Senior VP/ C-level staff that their proposed solution is dumb and completely unworkable. Now I'm a contractor "Operations Research & Information Management Analyst" which basically means the same organization is paying me for my domain knowledge and continuity of experience in trying to get some good ideas from the past 18 months actually into production. Previously I had looked into what might help me bill myself as a Solutions Architect while job-hunting and 90% of the resources I found were just "how to sell people on AWS." -_-

CapricornNoble 5y ago

>>>If the org has poor information management, getting requirements is already a mess, and the SA is already screwed. From what I've seen (with contracted SAs), SAs are just inventorying and working around the half-finished implementations the previous SAs left behind, ad infinitum. ^This has been my life for the past 5 years. I was the Information Management Officer for a military org with ~25,000 personnel, and our org suffered ~50% turnover in senior leadership EVERY SUMMER. It's been like groundhog day, every day. Operations personnel don't have the domain knowledge of the IT systems and Communications folks don't have the domain knowledge of the Operations, so neither side can put together a coherent, efficient architecture alone. The IMO is supposed to bridge that gap, focusing on documenting the business processes and helping to turn those into requirements, and possessing just enough IT systems knowledge to sanity-check the solutions proposed by the Communications staff. It's even harder to document the business processes when they are a) evolving b) rarely adhered to c) massive in breadth/scope. Sometimes the job entails telling Senior VP/ C-level staff that their proposed solution is dumb and completely unworkable. Now I'm a contractor "Operations Research & Information Management Analyst" which basically means the same organization is paying me for my domain knowledge and continuity of experience in trying to get some good ideas from the past 18 months actually into production. Previously I had looked into what might help me bill myself as a Solutions Architect while job-hunting and 90% of the resources I found were just "how to sell people on AWS." -_-