Understanding Enterprise Architecture: Roles of Enterprise, Solution, and Domain Architects

Enterprise architecture is considered a key way to gain competitive advantage through information technology, with growing demands to reduce costs, increase flexibility, and standardize the technical environment.

Conceptually, enterprise architecture can be divided into different layers, including business architecture and IT architecture (data, application, and technology architecture).

Solution architecture accepts a problem and proposes building blocks to solve it, often reusing elements provided by enterprise architecture such as enterprise building blocks, functions, standards, and guidelines.

Enterprise architects have many roles and responsibilities within the EA team and elsewhere, and they are often confused with solution architects or technical/infrastructure architects due to overlapping duties, but each role is essential for project success.

Four Architecture Domains

Enterprise architecture guides an organization’s business, information, process, and technology decisions to execute its business strategy and meet customer needs; typically there are four interrelated architecture domains.

Business Architecture describes how the enterprise is organized and the functions needed to deliver the business vision, answering what and who questions.

Application Architecture describes individual applications, their interactions, and their relationship to core business processes, answering how business services are implemented.

Data Architecture describes the logical and physical structure of an organization’s data assets and data management resources, enabling data‑driven insights.

Technology Architecture describes the software and hardware required to implement business, data, and application services.

Enterprise Architect

An enterprise architect defines business goals with key stakeholders and creates supporting enterprise infrastructure to ensure alignment with the company’s business strategy. Responsibilities include assisting in creating and executing an IT architecture roadmap, designing roadmaps for all domains with domain architects, identifying operational gaps, and proposing improvement methods.

Key responsibilities:

Analyze current trends in the technology architecture domain and provide recommendations.

Evaluate whether applications meet enterprise and business standards.

Determine the survivability of architecture in relation to organizational changes.

Train technical staff on best practices for governance models and frameworks.

Solution Architect

A solution architect evaluates business requirements and translates them into solutions, products, or services. They work across various industries, coordinating activities from concept definition through requirement analysis, implementation, and hand‑off to IT operations.

Key responsibilities:

Manage application development teams during design and build phases.

Provide training and mentorship to junior staff.

Collaborate with developers to achieve business objectives.

Oversee strategic relationships within the technical environment.

Domain Architect

A domain architect is an expert with deep knowledge in a specific domain and may be part of the enterprise architecture team or work on delivery projects. The term “domain” refers to the skill set required for a narrow knowledge area.

Business Architect

Application Architect

Information Architect

Technical Architect

Data Architect

Security Architect

Enterprise Architect vs Solution Architect vs Domain Architect

Enterprise architects define the problems that need to be solved.

Solution architects translate those problems into concrete solutions.

Domain architects are responsible for a specific solution area (e.g., a business architect works with an enterprise architect on business architecture, while an application architect collaborates with another domain architect on application architecture).

Source: http://jiagoushi.pro/node/1217

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