How Solutions Architecture Relates to Other Architecture Practices

Overview

Solutions Architecture draws on and integrates a set of specialized architecture practices — Business Architecture, Data & Information Architecture, Technical/Technology Architecture, and Security Architecture, among others — rather than operating as one more peer specialization alongside them.

This list is representative, not exhaustive: new specialized practices can be added as they are identified.

Each of these specialized practices can itself contain narrower focus-area specializations. A Technical/Technology Architect may specialize in a specific technology, such as storage solutions. An Application Architect follows the same pattern: it is a type of Technical/Technology Architect who specializes in a specific application or set of applications, each of which provides specific capabilities or services that solve IT and/or Business problems — not a subtype of Solutions Architecture itself, despite the similarity in name.

Classifying which specialized practice a given “thing” belongs to depends on its function, not its surface label. Real Estate, for example, typically falls under Business Architecture — but a Data Center or Co-Location Center, despite also being “Real Estate,” belongs to Technical/Technology Architecture instead, because it exists to house technology infrastructure rather than to support business operations directly.

Best Practice: Draw on Specialized Practices Deliberately, Rather Than Duplicating Them

Early in an engagement, identify which specialized architecture practices the problem actually touches, and draw on the relevant specialists rather than attempting to perform that specialized work from within Solutions Architecture itself. A Solutions Architect’s role is to integrate and orchestrate this expertise toward a comprehensive answer, not to replace it.

Benefit(s)

Deliberately drawing on specialized practices avoids reinventing expertise that already exists elsewhere in the organization, ensures the right depth of knowledge is applied to each dimension of a problem, and scales naturally with the size of the engagement: a simple problem may need input from only one specialist, while a complex one draws on several working together, as established in the discussion of Solution Set scale variability earlier in this document.