A dear child has many names

You may call the role delivery architect, solution architect, program architect, enterprise architect or solution authority.

The important thing is not what you call the role but what you need to do in this role.

First of all, it’s end-to-end accountability for a large project or a program. With end-to-end accountability I mean both business and IT.

End-to-end

If your responsibility is end-to-end for technical part of a CRM implementation, you are missing a number of areas.

An example of a full end-to-end solution could be:

• Implementation of a CRM solution from one vendor

• Changes in existing IT-systems

• Integrations between internal and external IT-systems

• Data migration

• Changes to business operations

• Changes to IT-operations

Thus not only IT and often more than one technical solution.

Accountability

It’s your head as a guarantee for the solution to work. This means that you also have the power to say no, i.e. veto in the program. However, if the steering group say yes, when you say no, it’s their accountability.

With this role, you work together with the program manager, and you both participate in the steering group meetings.

Why is it needed?

If part the solution to work end-to-end includes any type of manual work, either in business or IT, or you have changes to existing systems, you have integrations to other systems, there is a risk that some of these parts of the whole go wrong and the chain is broken.

If you sell a product or a service, and can’t track the payments for the invoices you have, then you got a severe crisis.

Another example is when you manually enter products and prices in two different systems, one new and one old, and you miss something.

It could also be related to data, where the data format differs massively between the existing and the new systems. It could also be related to data quality, or the lack of thereof.

Question

Who is crazy enough to take this role?