Enterprise architect
Grade G7
What enterprise architects do
Enterprise architects are leaders working across different levels within an organisation to translate the business strategy into business change and technical delivery.
Role responsibilities
An enterprise architect supports lead architects in ensuring the strategy is developed, agreed and followed.
As an enterprise architect, you will partner with senior DfE business, strategy and policy leads and stakeholders across the department, to demonstrate the business value of Enterprise Architecture as an enabler of strategy formulation, business change and technology innovation. You will collaboratively develop business capability models and roadmaps to facilitate discussion and decision making.
You will be working in [for example] the Schools and Curriculum digital delivery portfolio, which includes services like Get help buying for your school, Start and manage an academy and Build or repair a school.
The role
All architects within Government are responsible for the design and build of both solution and technical architectures. It is their job to communicate the vision for government services to developers and non-developers alike. You'll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working with departments and in multidisciplinary teams. Above all, you'll want to make government better, which may sometimes involve challenging the status quo.
You will lead analysis of the organisation's future-state capabilities and current/future IT environment, to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement, driving the organisation forward. To do this, you will have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies and the ability to take a balanced approach to technology selection. You'll be able to converse easily with and translate between non-technical stakeholders and technical practitioners. You'll be able to switch between different problems and responsibilities and be directly involved in service delivery.
You could be working on anything from transforming core technology services to architecting substantial digital services, for example the Schools and Curriculum digital delivery portfolio, which includes services like Get help buying for your school, Start and manage an academy and Build or repair a school. Other examples of our services include Find an apprenticeship, School performance tables, Get information about schools and Get into teaching. Our services are developed by multi-disciplinary teams using a variety of technologies — you would ideally have experience across multiple platforms, technologies and delivery methodologies.
You’ll undertake structured analysis of technical issues, translating this analysis into designs that describe a solution. You can be consulted on design and are capable of providing design patterns. You can identify the deeper issues that need fixing and look for opportunities to collaborate and reuse components, communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Collaborating with other DfE leaders, you will help build an architecture capability that can deliver the DfE priorities, as well as supporting capability building across government.
You will have oversight of the work of architecture community members on projects, programmes and business-as-usual activities, ensuring work is of an appropriate standard. Where appropriate, you should lead by example and positively resolve issues collaboratively.
There will be opportunities to contribute to the development of the pan-government community and wider technology leadership across government.
Your main responsibilities
In the Department for Education you will:
- work across a programme or group of projects aligned to a portfolio or domain, across DfE, to understand the needs of the delivery programmes and projects, defining suitable strategies, architectures and roadmaps to meet those needs
- build and maintain technical roadmaps, looking ahead for future opportunities or blockers, and ensuring decisions by service teams align with the strategy
- advise on optimal architectures and ensuring projects are run using appropriate assurance activities, best practice guidelines and appropriate methodologies
- anticipate and mitigate against architecture challenges or risks within projects
- define and manage technical procurement requirements
- have involvement in the wider development community, identifying good practices to adopt and sharing experiences (e.g., through community meet‑ups, blog posts and other collaboration channels)
- advise service owners and their teams on the estimated effort and technical implications of current user stories, as well as those in the backlog
- help to enable the reuse of patterns, tools and components across the whole government service landscape
- help to mature architecture practice and profession to ensure delivery is strategically aligned and provides best value; helping to maintain the architecture body of knowledge, developing standards and patterns that contribute back to wider technical communities
- provide leadership and support in the architecture community (which may include line management), offering independent leadership to ensure issues are resolved positively across DfE
- support the architecture community in DfE, ensuring a diverse group of people feel welcome, respected and supported, and support counterparts in other parts of government to build an active community that everyone in architecture and leadership across government can belong to and participate in
Skills you need
It is essential that you can demonstrate the following experience in your application and at the interview:
- working as a technical, solution, business or enterprise architect (or equivalent), operating across a wide range of architectures, technologies and programming languages
- working across varied technology domains, such as business, applications, data, infrastructure, integration and security
- providing technology leadership in complex projects and programmes, with an understanding of long-term business objectives and the ability to suggest technical strategies to meet those objectives by introducing innovation through technology
- suggesting and influencing good digital, software and data design
- working with business and technology stakeholders to translate business problems into suitable architectures and designs, producing clear architecture artefacts underpinned by sound technology solution design principles
- strong stakeholder management, evidencing the influencing and execution skills of enterprise architecture, including the ability to interact with stakeholders at all levels, translating technical concepts between all parties
- ability to make effective decisions, characterised by managed levels of risk and complexity, explaining clearly how the decision has been reached and recommending decisions as the risk and complexity increase
- ability to resolve technical disputes between wider peers and indirect stakeholders, taking into account all views and opinions
- experience in the use of cloud technologies, cloud strategies and in architecting solutions for the cloud, as well as big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and automation
As part of our continued drive to build capability across our teams, the following skills would be an advantage, but are not essential:
- technical knowledge and skills across several domains, which may include software design, development, engineering and integration, cloud-native services, productivity tools, applications, infrastructure, data solutions, business / service design
- a background in software development / engineering is strongly preferred, along with the ability to suggest and influence good digital design
- the ability to suggest and influence good data architecture, with experience of creating and designing data solutions
- experience of writing thematic papers or thought leadership blogs, leading discussions and deep-dives on specific subject-matter areas
- experience of modern engineering practices (such as DevOps, CI/CD, PaaS) and cloud-native platforms and services (such as Azure, AWS, GOV.UK PaaS, O365, ServiceNow)
- experience of technical assurance within UK Government Service Assessments
- architecture qualifications or certifications (such as TOGAF, Business Architecture Guild)
- line management experience, including coaching, mentoring and developing yourself and others