💃 Technical Architects - Assess that "new to you" environment 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! How do you feel when you win that project or land that gig? One one hand, it’s exciting to start that new project! On the other, now you’ve got to wrap your head around ANOTHER environment!🤯 We need to understand the structure of the business, how information flows through it, the applications that support it. Businesses aren’t running only on Salesforce either. Where do you even start? Today we’re going to scratch the surface of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and how it can help us come to understand our client’s environments. 💪

Agenda for today includes

• Foundations

• Assess that “new to you” environment

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Foundations

So let’s start with what this even is …

Enterprise architecture (EA) paints “the big picture” 🖼️ of the entire organization. What we’re doing here is creating a blueprint. One that describes the business processes, hierarchical structure, systems, and technologies that make up your business. All while promoting team alignment and standardization!

Like most complex things, EA is broken down into smaller architectural domains. Just think of them as categories you can organize your thoughts, research, documentation into. Don’t stress 💦 about getting it all done at once. Start small, put together some notes about what each domain looks like in your organization.

Assess that “new to you” environment

🏢 Business Architecture

Describes how the enterprise is organizationally structured and what functional capabilities are necessary to deliver the business vision.

Aim to know the things that give the organization structure and sense. Like the teams, processes, systems, and procedures. You don’t need to dive real deep into nuances or edge cases. Follow the happy path🤗 and understand it. Then move on to exception handling and any other gritty details. Pretty soon you’ll have a blueprint of the business going.

📊 Data Architecture

Describes the structure of an organization’s logical and physical data assets and data management resources.

Become a Jedi Master of the data in your organization. We know we have tools available within Salesforce for understanding some of this - Object Manager, Schema Builder, Lucidchart. This is a great start. The goal 🥅 here is to describe how data is managed across the organization - things like how do we collect data, what about transformations, where is it distributed and how?

📱Application Architecture

Describes the individual applications, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization.

This is probably where most of use are going to be most comfy. 🛏️ See how the applications within the organization meet its needs, how they interact with each other, and, in some cases, you’ll need an understanding of how they are assembled. How is it structured? What patterns or techniques were used? I’m talking code, DevOps, and Integrations!

🛡️ Technology Architecture

Describes the software and hardware needed to implement the business, data, and application services.

Here we’re looking to collect information on all of the different technical components that support the needs of the business. So things like systems, security policies, networks, infrastructure, application services, dev stacks. 💻 I won’t lie - some of this is a stretch for me and out of my purview. In that case I just note what I can on the important stuff and move on.

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes