What are some specific examples of the business value enterprise architects (EAs) offer?

In my current role as a chief enterprise architect, I cover all of the products that make up the Intuit platform. You can build product capabilities all day long, but you cannot ship it if you don't know who your customers are. You need to have that data mindset end-to-end, from who your prospect is to what you are selling — what features are they using in QuickBooks? The separation between those aspects is blurring, and the enterprise architect has a huge role to play in bringing all of this together because they have that end-to-end understanding of what makes a good business. As an EA, you have to be committed to understanding what business you are in, because technology is the means to the end.

Enterprise architecture can even help with risk management. When the Log4j issue showed up, wouldn’t it have been nice if you could see a map of your vulnerabilities and use that to establish how you will drive decisions? Architecture can give you a way to measure outcomes with impact analysis, whether it is for risk management or something else. Architecture begins as a framework or capability map, but it also becomes the connective tissue that enables analysis in a self-serve way.

Part of my remit this year is having a conversation about placing architecture back in a place of prominence so that I can reduce how much I spend on security. If an organization has not placed enterprise architecture in the lead role it should have, it will continue to experience cyber attacks. Enterprise architecture helps to drive, facilitate and create integrated and well-structured solutions. I've seen brilliant architects at many organizations, but they always had to fight to have their position and business value understood. I can't understand why it continues to be a constant conversation, year after year, company after company.