A Solution Architect is a professional responsible for designing and overseeing the implementation of complex systems or solutions that meet the specific needs of a business or organization. They play a critical role in bridging the gap between business requirements and technical solutions, ensuring that the overall system architecture aligns with the organization's goals, technical standards, and constraints.
Following are most common aspects of the solution in an organizatin
Technnology Selection
Choosing the appropriate technologies, platforms, and tools that best fit the project's requirements
Solution architect creates a proof of concept and prototype, which considers the corporate requirements, and then recommends the right technology and tools for implementation. Solution architecture aims to build in-house rather than third-party tool sourcing and define software standards across the organization.
Solution Implementation
Provide high level overview of different implementation components of the product beforehand, which might help to plan execution.
System Design
Creating the architecture of the system, which includes designing the structure, components, modules, and interfaces of the software solution.
Cots & Budget
Give a good estimation of the overall cost of the project which help to deifne budget of project which includes human resources, infrastucture and other licesing-related cost.
Global Compliance and Standards
If the solution need to be depoyed globally, each country and region has its own laws and compliance while designing solutoion solution architect consider the law and compliance.
Making sure the solution adheres to industry standards, regulatory requirements, and organizational policies.
Business Requirement
Consider all business requirements which includes functional and non functional requirements.Making sure business requirement compatible therefore allowing them to be converted into technical implementation.
Infrastructure requirement
Determines what kind of IT infrastructure is required to execute the project, which includes computing, storage, network, and so on. This helps to plan the IT resources more effectively.
End User Requiement
End user, who will be the actual consumer of the product, solution architect pays special attention of the requirement for end user. During implementation and launch, the solution architect provides a standard document and typical language structure in order to make sure that all of the requirements have been met to satisfy the user's needs.
Solution Maintaince
Maintain post-launch activities, such as solution scalability, disaster recovery, operational excellence, and so on.
Guiding the implementation process to ensure that the architectural vision is followed throughout the development lifecycle
Risk Management
Identifying potential risks in the proposed solutions and devising strategies to mitigate them
Integeration
Ensuring that the proposed solution integrates well with existing systems, both within the organization and externally.
Project Timeline
Solution architecture designs the layout details of each component with their complexity, which further helps to define the project milestones and timeline by providing resource estimation and associated risks.
Global Team
Team work across time zones to increase productivity and optimize project cost, Solution desgn need to consider a globally distriuted structure.
A good solution architecture not only satisfies the functional and non-functional requirements, but also addresses system scalabilities and maintenance in the long run.