TechOpsBiz Architect, some insights

Who is a technical architect?

The one who can come up with architecture of a product.. That’s it !!

Not at all..

Definitely he is technical guy, but not only technical, he should be business guy as well and also management guy.. And mainly operations guy..

Well.. One role as technical architect most of the time an Individual contributor and so many responsibilities with sub roles??

Yes.. There are many overlapping sub roles that play vital role in an organization..

Lets talk little in detail..

First and foremost,

As in role name itself, yes he has to be technical, as in mix of all technologies which make up the product and other loosely coupled technologies which can help this product to operate in field coming to core technical aspects.

A product will be built from bottom to top, with multiple technologies at different layer of the product. A technical architect must be having knowledge of how each of them developed, deployed and how interact with each other, meant to say interfaces to talk.

As technical architect, he should be helping technical teams aka development, testing and also mainly automation or devops team which help in shipping the product quickly. An architect must be having end to end strategy for development, testing, delivery and deployment. There may be multiple architect roles based on breadth of product or product suite, like development architect, QA architect and automation architect. I feel QA and automation architect overlap more. Technical at architect should make sure end to end delivery of product on time (Here comes management part of it).

Technical architect must ensure delivery of product should be on time, working in collaboration with Product, Dev, Program and QA managers. Any technical glitches that delay product delivery should be handled by technical architect, which gives partial management aspect to the role.

Yes.. Its technical architect and partial technical manager role..

Is it enough and stops here??..

Nope.. In fact role of technical architect starts from here. So far talked about traditional responsibilities of a technical architect so far.

In today’s technological space, this role is evolving into new dimensions..

Once product is ready to deploy in field. There comes real challenge.

Since architect is the on who know end to end flow, he should be equipped with how product going to deploy in field and while doing so it has to interact with so many other products and platforms like not only on-premise, but also different cloud models, which are not developed by your organization.

There comes real breadth of skills of technical architect. He must be able come with strategy and collaboration and resolve any issues for smoother deployment and foregoing operations. With this, want to add one more arrow to architects quiver, Operations architect or field architect. Not necessarily a different role but main skill of an architect that he should possess.

We are just half way through..

Another main aspect of technical architect role should be business part of it. Domain, in which the product that we are building, whats the potential market capitalization. I mean not a pure business aspect here, rather technical part of business. How can we expand our product deployment into overlapping market by means of technological integration or adopting new technology, as technology world is into consolidation mode now.

Ealier, we had organizations specialised developing products like, storage or networking or servers or database or security products in isolation, but now can see most of products bundled together with all these aspects in single stack. Every layer in stack designed keeping interaction with other like Storage plus security, network plus security, Distributed storage plus database systems, System with all these in one with enterprise and in micro services architecture etc.

One step ahead, most of products don’t sit alone in customer data center and are moving to cloud to address real time customer issues. Use cases like processing petabytes of data, made on-premise data centers not suitable and making workloads to migrate to cloud. Post processing new aspect of technology, forecasting through analytics is new dimension that technology world is contributing to traditionally non technical domains like real estate etc.

In this, considering breadth and depth of technical business, there can be sub roles like cloud architect, migration architect, analytics architect, solutions architect. But an ideal technical architect should have flavor all these roles mentioned right from beginning of this article.

So, understanding product depth and market breadth in terms of technology is very crucial to technical manager role.

Specifically, Architect having skill set with blend of all, suitable for product startups. Team of architects, but not more in number are suitable for growing organizations like unicorns. A vertical of architects is suitable for bigger organizations having wide range of product portfolio.

Will talk more about technical architect aspects in upcoming articles.. Stay tuned..