In on-premises environments, customers often have a central team for technology architecture that acts as an overlay to other product or feature teams to ensure they are following best practices. Technology architecture teams are often composed of a set of roles such as Technical Architect (infrastructure), Solutions Architect (software), Data Architect, Networking Architect, and Security Architect. Often these teams use TOGAF or the Zachman Framework as part of an enterprise architecture capability. It is preferable to distribute capabilities into teams rather than having a centralized team with that capability.

There are risks when you choose to distribute decision-making authority, for example, ensuring that teams are meeting internal standards. We mitigate these risks in two ways.

First, it is encouraged to have practices that focus on enabling each team to have that capability, to access experts who ensure that teams raise the bar on the standards they need to meet.

The second is to put in place mechanisms that carry out automated checks to ensure standards are being met.

Customer-obsessed teams build products in response to a customer’s need. For architecture, this means that we expect every team to have the capability to create architectures and to follow best practices.