Architects are accountable for the architectural design of enterprise systems and are often responsible for commissioning, planning and assuring the correct delivery of them too. Each architect must demonstrate that their design is based on clear and explicit decisions that trace directly to selected business objectives and aligns with the over-arching strategy, quality goals and user needs. In those decisions, trade-offs will inevitably be required and must be explained, given the concerns of the users and other system stakeholders. 

In addition, an Architect is responsible for a solution approach that is compelling to key stakeholders who commission the system, who will deliver or operate it, or who will otherwise need to live with and ‘within’ the system in the future. As such the architect will need to gather stakeholder opinions and insight, and balance different demands to provide clear decisions and designs to meet them. They must also deal with objections and trade-offs, showing leadership, clarity of thought and impartiality throughout. 

It isn’t just strategic design we need. Architects work hand in hand with delivery teams and are often expected to be hands-on with coding prototypes or technical management of teams.

What you could be doing

There are four main job families under this cluster:

• Technical Architects
  Technical Architects undertake structured analysis of technical issues, translating this analysis into technical designs that describe a solution. You will work across multiple teams to identify the deeper issues that need fixing and look for opportunities to collaborate and reuse components, communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. You could be working on scaling the use of public cloud services across many services or applying machine learning techniques in an operational context.

• Business Architects
  Business Architects at the Home Office work to shape and evaluate the high-level designs of all proposed changes, identifying gaps, redundancies and opportunities for reuse of business and technology assets. Our teams maintain a bird’s-eye view of the major strategy and design elements, serving as the link between Policy, Strategy, Analyses, Planning & Delivery teams.

• Data Architects
  Data Architects set and deliver the vision for the Home Office’s use of data. These roles focus on defining, developing, implementing and delivering the data architecture strategy for the department. As well as designing data models and metadata systems, teams will implement technology systems that follow the agreed Home Office strategy.

• Security Architects
  As a Security Architect you will create and design security for a system or service, maintain security documentation and develop architecture patterns and security approaches to new technologies. You will collaborate with peers both within and outside your portfolio departments to identify new opportunities for exploiting emerging technologies and lead the development of architectures, patterns and approaches to support their safe use in accordance with the department’s risk appetites.

The benefits of working in the Architecture cluster

Members of the Architecture cluster have access to the benefits generally available to Home Office staff and members of the Digital, Data and Technology Profession.