Who are the architects of your organization?

In any organisation undergoing a major transformation, whether it's an IS overhaul, a cloud migration, a merger or acquisition, or a pivot towards data and AI, one question keeps coming back. Do you need a dedicated enterprise architect, or can you get by without one?

Behind this seemingly technical question lies a real debate about the very nature of the role, its actual usefulness and its positioning within the transformation ecosystem. Our conversations with architects, transformation leaders, business stakeholders and consultants have been feeding this reflection for several years, and a few strong convictions have emerged.

The enterprise architect, quiet backbone of transformations

Running a transformation without an enterprise architect is a bit like renovating a house without an overall plan. You move forward room by room, and only later do you discover that the new bathroom has cut off the kitchen's water supply. The enterprise architect holds that bigger picture. They bridge business strategy and technology capabilities, spot the invisible dependencies between systems, and anticipate how a local decision will ripple across the wider application landscape.

In transformation programmes, their role is threefold. First, they frame: they map the existing landscape, sketch out the target state and identify the gaps. Second, they arbitrate: faced with technology choices, conflicts between business units and the temptation to over-customise, they bring a structured voice grounded in principles. Third, they align: they make sure that what's being built today won't become tomorrow's technical debt.

Without this function, transformations quickly drift. Projects move forward in silos, technology choices are made on a case-by-case basis, and the IS landscape grows more tangled rather than more rational. In the short term, everything seems to flow. In the medium term, the bill explodes.

The dark side: the architect in the ivory tower

But let's be honest, the enterprise architect also carries something of a bad reputation, and not without reason. How many organisations have watched these profiles shut themselves away producing endless TOGAF diagrams, disconnected from the field, churning out charts that nobody reads? The archetype of the architect in the ivory tower, designing theoretical cathedrals while teams wade through reality, is no caricature. It's a drift seen far too often.

This drift has a cost. It undermines the function's credibility, frustrates operational teams and ultimately sidelines architecture in real decision-making. When the architect becomes a bureaucratic checkpoint rather than a genuine partner in the transformation, teams learn to work around them. And the organisation loses precisely the overarching view that made the function valuable in the first place.

The real value of an enterprise architect is therefore measured less by the richness of their deliverables than by their ability to bring people on board, to engage in dialogue, and to make their recommendations actionable. A good architect is as much a communicator as a technician.

A diffuse role or a dedicated position: a question of context

Another strong conviction stands out from our discussions: enterprise architecture is not a question of organisation size, it's a question of posture. That nuance matters.

In a large group, with hundreds of applications, dozens of programmes running in parallel and a high level of technical complexity, the dedicated enterprise architect position almost imposes itself. The cognitive load, the need for a permanent cross-cutting vision and the sheer number of stakeholders all justify a full-time profile, or even a structured architecture team.

In an SME or mid-cap company, things are different. The function exists, but it's carried out in a diffuse way. The CIO often plays the role alongside their broader leadership remit. Sometimes it falls to a senior project manager, a head of transformation, an experienced lead developer, or an external consultant brought in for a scoping phase. What counts is not the label on the business card, but that someone carries this overall vision and embodies it in the decisions that get made.

The mistake is to assume that a small structure doesn't need architecture, or conversely that a large group can settle for solo architects cut off from real decisions. In both cases, the transformation suffers.

Democratising enterprise architecture: Boldo's mission

That's precisely the conviction that drives us at Boldo. Enterprise architecture is too valuable to remain the preserve of a handful of highly specialised experts. We want to lower the barrier to entry to make it accessible to everyone who, in practice, plays this role day to day, whether they're called architects, CIOs, heads of transformation, consultants or simply leaders of a major project.

Our ambition is to equip these practitioners so they can step out of the static posture of the diagram producer and move into a dynamic, communicative architecture that sits genuinely at the heart of the transformation. An architecture that gets shared, that lives within teams, that adjusts to the rhythm of the business, and that restores the full strategic leverage of the function.

Because in the end, the question is no longer so much who is the enterprise architect, but how to make sure this key competence runs through the whole organisation.