The role of a Senior Architect on Digital Transformations (Part I)

Our challenging exponential world.

As a matter of fact, things are going fast. If we take the example of chat GPT, most of us got to hear about it in the second half of 2022, Today, Dreamforce, one of the biggest Software companies in the world is making a 5-day event with tens of thousands of attendees all about Generative AI. If we take another example different from ChatGPT, you have probably seen how companies like Paypal are adapting their products to a new Web3 reality where the web interactions will behave completely differently. 

It´s even worse than that, based on Gartner's Top 10 Tech trends in 2023, at least 2 of them are AI-based technologies. And you know what? A fast-changing environment like the present is creating a lot of challenges but also a lot of opportunities for you as an Architect looking to grow in the role. More than ever, it´s essential to create a team that is ready for future challenges and there is a need to provide innovations and assess the impact on the current business and it landscape of your company or partners. 

As a Digital architect, you will have to keep an eye on many challenges and opportunities to provide the best value possible and show your leadership team that they can count on you to be on the next level as Senior Digital Architect to help your organization or customer to lead Digital Transformation from the Architecture point of view. Especially having in mind this fast-changing world where all can change in your next sprint. Let me start with the first 3.

3 common challenges and opportunities for you as a Senior Architect:

1. Talent scarcity: let´s be honest, you can´t be on top of every single detail of a digital transformation and let´s be even more brutal, Your team is not ready to execute a digital transformation, but we all know it´s part of the challenge. It´s important to accept that and get ready to mentor your team on digital activities and create a place where uncertainty is part of the process. There is nothing like accepting a problem, and this is the most important one, your team is not familiar with everything you need and you just can´t rely on hiring new professionals, you need to train your team. So number one rule, make sure that your digital leader understands that as part of the delivery methodology you count for technical spikes, analysis, access to partners, and time to train your team. You as a senior architect need to help with that.
2. Changes in IT-Business relationship: All is changing, and that also includes the relationship between the different parts of the organization. And I don´t want to talk here about Agile methodology, but about how to leverage the most out of our Architect and Tech-savy talents. As the digital ecosystem is growing dramatically with new products every day that not only provide automatization to our business processes but provide new business models altogether, it´s important for our architects to take the lead on how to approach those meetings where it´s important to explain how a technology requires a change of culture, processes and even organization of the business functions of the company. There are many ways to approach it, but the most important thing is to make it predictive and create a forum where these conversations are recognized and the impact is managed. Learning how to take those new business models to the business side will help you to show leadership and seniority in the role.
3. Innovation: Probably, as a Digital architect you specialize in a domain or technology, it doesn´t matter if you are a Commerce Architect, an Adobe Experience Manager Architect, or a Mulesoft Architect, you need to keep up with the evolution of the product and work of what is the best way of your team to apply that innovation in your projects. And, let me be clear, innovation is not only to apply that new concept or change in your projects, is also to make things in a different way. You need to work with your teams to establish the best governance to address that challenge. Usually is not just with your teams, but partners, start-ups, and other business players that can provide knowledge and know-how. This is a great opportunity for implementing a governance that can help get the best from extended teams.

These 3 challenges are common in digital transformations and there are ways to create opportunities for self-growth with the right support. They are part of your career path and it´s important to get ready to lead your team and yourself to make sure the right outcomes are in place when the time comes.

You can do it! If you need support, let me know.

Every time you overcome one of these challenges, you are shown seniority in Digital Transformations. This is not a one-person army job but a long-running activity that takes time effort and a lot of coaching a self-improvement. But organizations are every day more receptive to these changes and the right outcomes are often seen as a high-value contribution. It´s not if you can do this job or not, the question is if you accept the challenge. 

Please, get in touch if these challenges and others are familiar to you and you want to know more about how to better manage them. I can provide support.

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Please, any feedback is welcome. I am planning to create a second version with more common challenges, but happy to focus on any that is important for this community. At the end of the day, all I want to do is to help you.

Also, if you have an example of another challenge that you have encountered during your projects and you want to analyze it together, please get in touch and we can make an analysis about options and future decisions to make in similar situations.