Navigating the Roles of Solution Architects and Enterprise Architects

Mark Smith: 0:00
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Okay, welcome everybody to the show. This is the Ecosystem Podcast brought to you by Cloud Lighthouse. Today we're kicking off with something that seems to be on all our radars at the moment, and that is the area of architecture. What's the difference between a solution architect and enterprise architect and this is not just specific to the Microsoft business application landscape or the Azure landscape or M365,? Know, right across the various ecosystems that we interface with. What are these roles? What do they mean? Andrew, I think I'll throw to you first up when, when you think around, particularly this concept of ea and we're not talking about enterprise agreements here, we're talking about enterprise architecture. What does that mean?

Andrew Welch: 1:07
enterprise architecture. Yeah, you know this came up. I was on a call yesterday, I think, with someone and we were talking about how this organization has had people in and out saying oh I'm an enterprise architect, I'm going to be here to you know, help you kind of from a cross-technology perspective. And he said you know, help you kind of from a cross technology perspective. And he said you know, if what you're peddling is TOGAF, I don't want anything to do with it.

Andrew Welch: 1:29
And you know, I kind of dug further on this and he talked a little bit about how he's been frustrated with enterprise architects in the past because he's felt that they don't really have the technical or the technology knowledge skill to truly assemble all of these pieces across their cloud ecosystem. And that's what got me thinking about this topic most recently. But to me, an enterprise architect is really in the business of fitting technology together from across different buckets of tech or different product families. So if you cannot piece together fabric and the data platform and Azure infrastructure and power platform and dynamics, then to some degree or another you're not an enterprise architect in my opinion.

Ana Welch: 2:20
How many technologies must an enterprise architect know? If not, they cannot be agnostic, right, because they won't be able to actually tell you what to do. But how many areas must they know?

Andrew Welch: 2:38
And because a lot of enterprise architects that I hear, but they but they kind of come out swinging against technology and they say, oh well, I'm technology agnostic. Now what I hear a lot is someone who will say, hey, I'm technology agnostic and you know what they're thinking is as long as this dynamics, so you get that a lot as well. But I just find that we've created this sort of totem about being technology agnostic and I'm more and more come to think that this is nonsense.

Mark Smith: 3:09
Frankly, it's a lie. It's a lie that people tell themselves Nobody is agnostic. I think it's a bullshit word because you do and you recommend what you know and what you don't know you don't talk about because you're ignorant, and what you don't know, so you're not an authority, so you don't talk about it, so there might be a better way. But if you don't know it, and so I feel this whole word of I am agnostic, whenever I hear it, I just it's kind of like my bullshit meter goes up and you're holier than thou type approach, because I have never seen a diagnostic person and in partner partner land working for large partners. You get this a lot Like oh listen, we don't know whether we should recommend Salesforce or an Oracle solution or an SAP.

Mark Smith: 3:56
We're just going to be agnostic and put all the options on the table and it's kind of like that is such rubbish, right? Yeah, I'm opposed to the word agnostic. People do what they know 100%?

Chris Huntingford: 4:11
Oh for sure. I mean, I'm probably the biggest culprit of that, right, like in the beginning, when I was all oh, I'm a solution architect, I know dynamics, and everything was hey, look, there's a hole, dynamics is a nail, you know, let's do that thing, right, yeah. And look, there's a whole dynamics as a nail, you know let's do that thing right, yeah.

Chris Huntingford: 4:24
And now that I've gotten more experience in the wider platform, like Copilot and Azure and all that thing, I'm like, oh wait, actually maybe I was a little bit wrong in doing that thing right there, and that's what I've learned. But even from an agnostic point of perspective, like even from the Microsoft point of view, I've looked at tools like Mendex and OutSystems and I know I'm talking like what we used to call low-code, probably rapid application developments.

Mark Smith: 4:55
But yeah, there's lots of ways to do things right, and I guess it's just broadening your perspective. So what is an enterprise architect? And I want to unpack because I feel and I've been on this bandwagon for about a month to six weeks at the moment is that enterprise architects strongly influence the decision maker, generally a C-level decision maker, like a CTO, a CIO, etc. They have massive influence on that decision maker because, because these c levels often don't have the technical depth of chops they think that the enterprise architecture does. And I feel enterprise architecture has a lot to do with it system frameworks, not necessarily a deep, even um. You know, if you look at that kind of t consulting area, they're very broad across systems and frameworks and you know, you see, togaf is kind of held up as the gold standard of enterprise architecture.

Mark Smith: 5:55
But it's this concern of this persona let's call the enterprise architect a persona, persona, this there's this concern that I feel we in the industry have ignored this persona to our detriment. And and I'm talking about educating this persona, um, giving them insights, giving them a level of risk mitigation, a career a. You know when we present new ecosystems to them that they've only heard the marketing talk around, they have negative perceptions. So are we saying the enterprise architecture is a massive influencer that needs to be proactively engaged with and dressed as part of any type of enterprise deployment or taking a customer on a journey to any of the ecosystems that we're involved in.

Andrew Welch: 6:49
I think it's a very common scenario that a CIO is going to look at a particular piece of technology or family of technologies, which I'm increasingly referring to things like fabric and power platform as product families or technology families, because I'm not convinced that the platform is Azure right, but neither here nor there. When I think, when a CIO or some sort of decision maker is looking at making a significant investment, they look to their enterprise architect for the thumbs up or the thumbs down Is this real? Is this not real? Can you work with this? Is there going to be value? The thumbs down Is this real? Is this not real? Can you work with this? Is there going to be value to you? Here, and I agree in a number of these circles, we, kind of the broader Microsoft community and, frankly, microsoft specifically have neglected the enterprise architect or the enterprise technical architect in the content that they've created and the reassurances that they're able to provide to that enterprise architect that this technology is going to be fit for purpose and get the job done in a scalable way.

Mark Smith: 7:51
Yeah.

Ana Welch: 7:55
But going back to the TOGAF mention, which is I've seen it a lot as well, it came as a surprise for me working at Curve that you know big I don't know organizations, public organizations, government organizations, like big commercial institutions. They want to achieve something and they do ask about methodology, always, always, always, always, thinking about TOGAF. And I'm thinking it's because nothing else encapsulates that many rules, or they don't know of any other framework that makes sure that we do take into account all of the tools and that we've got like an architectural strategy and actually we're going to have a framework for all of our content within the architecture and you know what's the capability and what's our governance, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm not even sure that it's meant literally anymore. It's rather what is your framework? You know, do you have a guy call him or her enterprise architect, who is able to draw a strategy like that for me, to make sure that I'm not missing out on anything?

Andrew Welch: 9:55
I think, Anna draws out a. There's an interesting point that's in there and that's the. You know, there's always the adage that nobody ever got fired for going with Accenture. No one ever got fired for going with the proven thing that everyone banks on Right and I think that to some extent, no one ever got fired for using TOGAF.

Andrew Welch: 10:23
So there's a real in organizations that have a perhaps an understandably higher level of risk aversion right. So the more regulated the organization is public sector, et cetera I think that they are going to always be quite keen, or often be quite keen, to ask those sorts of questions that Anna's talking about so have you know?

Mark Smith: 10:51
uh, togaf is only one of the, the, the standards in this area, right, there's. There's seven others. They're the the zachman framework, there's the federal enterprise and architecture framework, there's a department of defense architecture framework, there's a ministry of defense architecture framework, there's archie mate, then there's the garden enterprise architecture framework and the Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture are the other ones that come up. Are you seeing, though, as in across my career, it's always been TOGAF, right?

Mark Smith: 11:17
I've had application architects come to me with, let's say, 10 years experience and I talk about their career planning as a manager, and their number one request is will you pay for me to go through my TOGAF certification and and and? So I suppose I'm trying to open up a couple of views on this. One is and I'm asking questions here I don't know the answer is is TOGAF applicable? Because this is a question I just heard this week is togaf applicable in a cloud world? We have got multi-cloud environments as applicable as it, because it's, it's, it's. It came from an on-premise world right where um, that was its roots. Do any of you know whether it has, because I think it's up to version nine of TOGAF as the current version and don't quote me on that because I haven't quickly researched it, I'll do it in a second but has it evolved to include full cloud multi-cloud environments as part of that framework? Does anyone know that?

Chris Huntingford: 12:27
Yeah, I worry about that. I, anyone know? Yeah, I worry about that. I don't know enough to answer that, but what I can tell you I I heard a really funny reference the other day about like architectural, architectural best practice being a bit like a religious book, and it kind of is right, because you get solution architects that live and die by this shit, right, but those religious books were written millennia ago, right, and like many, many, many, many, many, many years ago, and the rules that applied then don't necessarily apply now. So like, why is it still relevant? And you can argue that the premise or the basic structure could be still be relevant, but actually I don't think it is and that's why I've always struggled with these architectural best practice structures, because I don't believe they align with everything that we do. I mean, tech is changing so fast. How would you keep up with something like that? That's just my perspective.

Ana Welch: 13:19
But best practice is hard to define, even on a very low level. Low level, like say, we're building a project, you and I, and I deal with my best practice, you know that I know of, and then you come and you're like wait a second.

Chris Huntingford: 13:38
But that's not best practice in my world.

Ana Welch: 13:40
Exactly. That's not exactly best practice. How do you even define it? Because I would define it by outcome. Yeah, absolutely so I agree with you on that right, Because best would define it by outcome.

Chris Huntingford: 13:48
Yeah, absolutely. So I agree with you on that, right, because best practice is in the eye of the beholder. Like your version of good is not my version of good, it's not Andrew's version of good. Well, let's just face it, we can't match up to your version of good. And I've seen your version of good and I'm like that's wild. But no, it's interesting, right, like I think it's a really good point and I also think, from a situational perspective, it can't always be the same. Like the definition of good has got to be different. That's why, like kudos to everyone who's done all the toe gap stuff and all of that, but it's just not my vibe.

Chris Huntingford: 14:16
Like I look at something I've created my own structural target operating model for the way that I architect ecosystems and it's based on multiple scenarios and the thing that's important about it is that it's still growing. It's a never ending thing and it can't stop growing, right, but that's just. You know, I remember going to a university and they were like, hey, man, could you do A, b and C for me? And I'm like, oh, like I've never thought of that. And I told them I'm like dude, I actually had never thought of that. So I went back and did the research and thought, oh man, I'll bolt that into my model. So when we talk to organizations now we're like look, you're part of an ever-growing model of things that we do, but that's my version and, yeah, you know, I don't know.

Mark Smith: 14:57
Yeah, I just did a big, a quick research. Um togath 10 came out in um. When did it come out? It came came out in April, the 25th 2022. And it explicitly addresses cloud ecosystems, providing guidance on developing, managing, governing enterprise architecture and cloud environments. So it's obviously been iterated on. I think there's fundamental principles in there.

Mark Smith: 15:21
I feel that in the areas that we work in in our careers, we interface with enterprise architects, but we're never in that role, um, because we're a subset of it, like, and that's where it's much more of the application architectural layers, rather than that enterprise. I'm just, um, yeah, interested in saying, as my question to you guys would be how do you think we could educate enterprise architects collectively in our area of the landscape? And the reason I say this is because what I'm hearing from enterprise architects is that when they hear something like the power platform, it's low code, it's citizen developer, they're like straight away going you know what? That's where the children play. This is not an enterprise tool for our organization. We'll put it in like we'd allow Excel in no worries, right? But, mate, we're never going to do anything. That's mission critical. And I see this relegation of the platform to all non-mission critical workloads to all non-mission critical workloads. And what blows my mind is that my career was built on the XRM story and all the apps that we built were mission critical. Yeah, you know, they run defense systems, they run border protection for countries, they run $100 million grant application systems. They were all major and I felt, you know, when the Power Platform came out in 2016 or didn't until 2019, get that label, but we saw that pivot and evolution from Microsoft. I was like, finally, we've got this mega platform to do what we've been butchering Dynamics products to do.

Mark Smith: 17:07
And then what we ended up getting was a software component level licensing model. Sorry, so you know, you could license Power Apps, you could license Power Automate, blah, blah, blah, blah. We didn't get a platform license that says, hey, here's your platform license, go and make amazing. Because, like I'm with you, chris, where I don't believe it's just about apps, it's everything we do is about solutions, and I don't know if I'm reading this right, but I seem to see that Microsoft looks like they're not prioritizing the marketing message around Power Automate. The same, because I think they're realizing everything has automation in it. It's not something in its own right. Everything has automation in it. It's not something in its own right. Everything has automation in it. We always had workflow as workflow foundation back in the day. It's just one of the tools.

Andrew Welch: 17:55
I've done a lot of of enterprise architecture work over the course of my career and you know it's probably obvious that Mark and I have been discussing this very topic offline for the last six weeks or so, but I just finished last week and this had been a project of mine that had been on hold because we just like everything.

Andrew Welch: 18:20
We got diverted to everything AI for about a year, but I dusted this off recently and I just finished up with the draft of a white paper. It's going to be a Microsoft white paper and the title is still in progress, but basically it's Patterns of Integration Between Power Platform and Azure Data Platform Services. This is a topic that Anna and I worked on extensively. I worked with some folks in various product groups on it. We've much written for the folks who are evaluating Does Power Platform have the have the wherewithal to be a first class citizen in the cloud ecosystem by way of often, azure data services and fabric, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really excited about it and we'll, we'll, we'll chat about it on a future episode, I'm sure.

Ana Welch: 19:33
I like it. I like it, and it's also about how to make it be, because I think that's very important actually, because Power Platform, exactly like you said, it can be many, many things, and recently I've been looking at Canvas apps, which are absolutely not my specialty at all, and they do some wonderful things, but you can also connect them to Excel still. So it depends how you look at things. Architect will be able to find, you know, mission critical scope for these tools in order to create speed and, you know, business outcomes I agree with you.

Chris Huntingford: 20:17
I think that sometimes, though I'm going to say something that's probably going to upset someone, I love it. I think that sometimes the enterprise architects are archaic fossils who live in a cave and understand the first version of Pega and then don't do anything after that. And then, unfortunately, those people making decisions are like hey, you know, Bob and Gary, let's go and pick Pega V1 or Mendix that didn't exist, I don't know some fucking weird on-prem thing and like, let's build it in that. But that's what happens, dude. Ultimately, in so many organizations, what we're finding is those enterprise architects aren't educated and they don't know everything and they don't understand the cloud even.

Mark Smith: 20:54
Isn't that on us? Isn't that?

Chris Huntingford: 20:56
on Microsoft.

Ana Welch: 20:57
It is.

Andrew Welch: 20:58
What's happened is that these Mark is Microsoft. Now Mark has hired himself at Microsoft.

Mark Smith: 21:05
What I'm saying is that I never want to just point the finger and not also take responsibility, if you like, for when you can educate the market. And I think that Microsoft's marketing message went after a segment and I'm probably broadly going the M365 segment of users, and whether they didn't understand it or they don't understand the role of the enterprise architect in the discussion, they didn't. That's why I kept referring to it as a persona. We need a story to educate this persona, because this persona is influencing so many critical decisions that you can't go I'm going to let you know one be ignorant and not identify the persona, and two, then go. You know what, when there's a vacuum, people make their own shit up, they make their own decisions, and what our competitors have done have not allowed a vacuum to exist when it comes to their products. They've educated, they've educated, they've educated one of of my teams in a company that I've just resigned

Mark Smith: 22:15
from a big team in SAP and one of the things that I found, you know, when I was pushing the let's migrate SAP to Azure and stuff, they were like, listen, on AWS, we have all this target architecture, target operating model. We have it all spelled out for whenever we want to move to aws. Where's that for microsoft? And I had to go back into microsoft and go where are these articles on this? And it's like they're there but they're not surfaced in a way that the people making these decisions go. You know what? It's easier to migrate to Azure than it is easier to migrate to AWS. So what is AWS? They have educated, educated, educated, educated, provided everything. Let's not leave a vacuum, let's not create a void, but let's fill it with our brand, our information, our handholding, and I feel that's where we've lacked in our sector of the market.

Ana Welch: 23:11
I think maybe that's true. The reality is that if you look for any sort of information, you will find it. You'll find information on governance, on security, on how to design a thing, on how architecture should look like. You find on phased approaches, on CIC, on everything. So you do find information, but it's everywhere. That's very, very true. In Microsoft's defense, they moved so quickly.

Mark Smith: 23:42
Like this technology grew so quickly, so is this just a teething thing, as in Microsoft, doesn't have the right to be a teething thing. They're the biggest company in the world. They're not a startup right, so I don't think they have the luxury of going. Oh, we were moving quickly. Hire, fill the space, educate. You're the biggest company in the world, you have the pockets to do it, address it. I just think it just hasn't been on people's radars to it. You know, and I know, andrew, you're waiting to jump in, and so actually I'll let you go. I want to land well architected, right From an Azure perspective, but also well architected that now is coming out for the power platform.

Andrew Welch: 24:28
Andrew. So that was actually what I was about to point out. I was about to say that, you know, in Microsoft land, it's not that Microsoft has not invested in these things and has not published these things and maintained them. Right, we have the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework, we have the Azure Well-Architected Framework, but I think that in Microsoft's case, microsoft has so much ground to cover from a technological perspective. Right, it's the only vendor out there that has a solution in each of the kind of product families or product buckets. Right, microsoft has Power Platform as an app dev platform, fabric as a modern data platform, alongside the other Azure data technologies that didn't somehow land inside of Fabric, azure Infrastructure, m365,. No other vendor out there has that. So, in Microsoft's case, I think it's a unique challenge that they've done a pretty good job with the cloud adoption framework and the well Azure, well architected framework, but those frameworks have failed to pull in some extraordinarily powerful bits of technology that exist outside of the product family that they were meant to address.

Andrew Welch: 25:49
Examples Examples yeah, yeah, I think the most obvious example to me is the weird relationship between Power Platform and the rest of Azure. And I say the rest of Azure because, yeah, dataverse is the most obvious specific bit here. I remember just a couple of years ago I was talking with one of the smartest data platform architects that I have ever met and he asked me this is a completely serious question. He asked me because I was talking about Dataverse and he said what's Dataverse? I've never heard of it.

Andrew Welch: 26:51
I've never heard of it, so here we have an absolute expert in Microsoft data platform technical services and architecture who has not only doesn't work with Dataverse, but has never heard of Dataverse, and that is heard of Dataflex.

Mark Smith: 26:55
Pro, dataflex Pro, was his experience? Classic, classic. Does anyone want to add anything else, because I think we'll wrap up here. We've come to a logical rant conclusion. We're really interested in hearing what the audience has to say on this and particularly what your lens is on enterprise architects on this whole need to educate and create content targeted specifically for them, and also really keen to hear what you're doing around upskilling in the area of well architected. It's worked so well in the Azure space. I am told I've not had firsthand experience. There's five basic levels to it there. And then, of course, recently announced is the Power Platform, well-architected Pillars, of which there's four key pillars that make up this and I am sure it's got growing space. I think, if I've got this this right, the person that did it for azure or kind of led it is now leading it for the power platform side of the house in microsoft, which is quite exciting can I just point out, though, that that well, I think that that's this is likely going to be a significant improvement.

Andrew Welch: 28:03
Right, we're still. This still, to me, is not enterprise architecture If we have the Azure, well-architected framework, and the power platform, well-architected framework.

Ana Welch: 28:15
Oh, and then you have the cybersecurity one as well, cybersecurity stuff. That's completely different from everything.

Andrew Welch: 28:22
And this is a level of depth that I think is really important inside of each of these product families because don't get me wrong we need the experts, architecturally and as developers and engineers inside of each of these product families that can make this stuff happen right. But we also need to do a much better and a much more intentional job of developing the cadre of architects across the industry and within specific customers and partners that are able to architect across the cloud. That's critical going forward.

Chris Huntingford: 28:58
Can I throw in one last thing before we wrap this up? The concept of ecosystem architecture as opposed to enterprise architecture and that might be for another discussion. Yeah, but just something we've been doing a lot of.

Mark Smith: 29:10
Anna, do you want to wrap us up?

Ana Welch: 29:12
Yeah, Well, I also have something. The very last thing would be. So we've had enterprise architecture, TOGAF, ecosystem architecture, frameworks and, on top of it all, what is a solution architect? I would really, really love to hear from people what's their view on what's a solution architect and what's the difference between all of them.

Mark Smith: 29:38
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.