Enterprise Architecture Value Model

The Level 4 architecture function requires a staffing profile that is genuinely different from the traditional architecture team, and it requires your deliberate investment to create. Architects who are skilled at governance documentation, framework development, and stakeholder advisory work are valuable — but they are insufficient for an organization that owns and operates a portfolio of horizontal engineering platforms. You need practitioners who can design, implement, build, package, deploy, instantiate, operate, administer, and support complex technical platforms.

The Software Engineering Capability Requirement

Software engineers who focus on horizontal and foundational platforms bring a specific combination of capabilities to your architecture function. They are accustomed to designing systems that serve many consumers simultaneously rather than a single application or domain. They understand the trade-offs between generality and optimization that come with building shared infrastructure. They have the operational discipline — SLAs, incident response, change management, release engineering — that managing a platform with broad organizational dependencies requires. And they bring the mathematical rigor, systems thinking depth, and implementation fluency that makes their architectural thinking concrete and actionable rather than conceptual and advisory. A software engineer who has designed and operated a complex horizontal platform at scale commands a different kind of organizational credibility than one who has reviewed designs from an advisory distance — and that credibility compounds across the delivery and vertical portfolio teams your architecture function needs to influence.

Building the Capability

You do not need to replace your existing architecture team to develop this capability. The most effective approach is to identify the practitioners in your current architecture function who have the strongest engineering instincts and the deepest delivery credentials, and to invest deliberately in developing their platform engineering and software engineering capabilities through targeted assignments, training, and partnership with engineering-capable practitioners recruited from outside the function. Your first horizontal platform ownership — whatever you choose it to be — will serve as the most effective training ground for the engineering capability you need to develop. There is no substitute for the learning that comes from being accountable for building and operating a real system that real people depend on.