The professional profile of the IT architect is broadly defined. On the one hand, the activity includes basic work such as the preparation and supervision of IT development plans. On the other hand, however, it also includes highly specific work that requires specialist knowledge of hardware or software components.
Specialized IT architects are responsible for defining software architectures and system solutions and planning their implementation. This is done on the basis of existing processes. For this purpose, the IT specialists record the business management structure and the requirements of a company.
The IT architects are also responsible for integrating new applications into the system landscape. In doing so, they ensure that the implementation of new components has no negative effects. They also find solutions to any difficulties that arise.
For work on the IT architecture, the knowledge of all IT systems used in the company is bundled. The IT architects create so-called IT master plans, which visually represent the IT system landscape of an organization.
Often there are different views with different abstractions and approaches for possible solutions. The goal of the development plans is to create transparency with regard to the current and future IT landscape. In this way, the later implementation can also be prepared. Accordingly, a distinction must be made between actual and target development landscapes.
All plans and models are used for interdepartmental and cross-company communication. In addition, the management can be informed about the current situation regarding the IT infrastructure.
It must be ensured that the development plans are always up-to-date. IT architects need support from other IT experts such as software architects, business analysts, requirement engineers (requirement managers) and developers.
Last but not least, the IT architect derives the IT strategy including the relevant IT services from the corporate strategy. Thus, he also fulfils an important task of Enterprise Architecture Management.