Chief Architect and Head of Architecture

As Chief Architect, I had the pleasure of building and working with a very focused and driven architecture team with the size of "Two Large Pizzas" who did a amazing job together with our key bussiness stakeholders, in-house partners and development teams.

I was also a member of the IT management team and reported to CIO.

Here are some examples of the work we did while acting as change agents for the organizations digital transformation.

## Digital transformation
We worked hard to clarify the IT operational model and aligne it for the need of
more efficient deliveries of customer value and establish IT as a value-creating
partner in the business and not just as a supplier.

This resulted in the beginning of productization of the organization's capabilities
together with modern agile principles, working methods and technology where IT is
seen as a natural part of the company's business development.


## IT-strategy

As part of the digitization, we also was responsible for developing an IT strategy that
clearly described and guided the organization towards the targeted state.

The IT strategy we produced was based on an IT strategic framework that highlights six strategic areas
with the aim of strengthening customer focus, collaboration and innovation.

The Strategic areas where:

- Ensuring continuous competence development
- Designing solutions for effective and continuous improvement
- Embracing the innovative power of the outside world
- Ensuring trusting relationships
- Activating the digital eco system
- Exploring the power of intelligent technology.

This resulted in an architecture evolution and modernization of the self developed claims systems, skills transfer and new infrastructure with a focus on customer value, automation, loosely coupled services, DevOps and everything as code.


## Enterprise architecture

Another mission was to define and establish the capabilities around enterprise architecture:

- Business architecture
- Information architecture
- Solution architecture
- Infrastructure architecture
- Security architecture.

This resulted in an enterprise architecture function with light-weight
documentation of architectural decisions, guiding principles and a curious coaching
approach, which together with various business areas and delivery teams develops the
organization's offering in "business services" based on the business capabillities.

## Collaboration and communication

As a natural part of all transformations, it required collaboration
and clear communication and anchoring with both management and employees
regarding changed responsibilities, competencies, delivery models.

It also changed and developed the business processes and business offers both within the
organization and externally.

One of the biggest changes was the creation of "Business Products", cross functional teams that included both business and developement competences to be able to act quick within a specified domain based on the business capabillity map with a clear RACI model. The teams where staffed by self selection with no management interferance. The process in short, the product owner first pitch their product and then every individual by them self selected the product they wanted to work with. We did this in close cooperation with product management and was a big step in the digialization journey.

The archiecture team had daily close contact with the teams and in most cases also a team member to drive the solution against the target architecture using the guiding principles.

## Audits

The architecture team also supported internal and external auditors to guide them in solutions and documentation.


## Data protection and GDPR

The architecture team also supported the data protection function and business domains around process development, implementation and implementation of processes linked to data protection.

And ofcourse we did al lot more :)