Solution Architecture

Solution architecture designs how a particular business need or capability will be delivered within existing constraints. It may concern one system or changes across several systems. A solution architect evaluates the combination of changes, their interactions, and the trade-offs required to deliver that capability.

Terminology varies between organizations. In this series, solution describes the focus on a particular need, while enterprise, segment, and system describe scope. This does not make other uses of solution as an intermediate level invalid. FEAF v2 also discusses solution architecture in relation to smaller-scale architecture work. For a cross-system example, publishing order changes for analytics touches a producing service, a streaming platform, an ingestion job, and a table. Enterprise standards constrain the options without fully specifying that design.

The outputs reflect that position: integration designs, the contracts between the parts, the options considered and the trade-offs taken, and decision records explaining why. Much of the work is negotiation, because the pieces belong to teams with their own priorities.

The part that causes trouble later is what happens at handover. Initiatives end; the relationships they created do not. The event schema is still a contract between two teams — with its own compatibility rules — the integration still has to survive changes on both sides, and the failure modes still cross boundaries. Assuming the solution ends when the project closes leaves nobody holding the cross-system view — a gap that an incident spanning several teams can expose.

So the question worth asking at handover is not whether documentation was produced, but who now owns the integrated picture. Plausible answers include the team that owns the contract, a domain architect at segment scope, or an explicitly named owner. If nobody is assigned, changes to one system can leave the integrated capability without coordinated support.

How this view relates to enterprise, segment, and system scope is set out in Architecture Levels and the Scope of a Decision.

References:

• OMB, Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework v2 (2013)