Featured in this week’s spotlight is Claire Wybrow, Enterprise Business Architect and Senior Solution Strategist of DMI.
Claire has worked with Fortune 500 companies across multiple industries for over 25 years. She thrives on establishing solid foundations for enterprise evolution leading to multiyear and multimillion-dollar strategic partnerships driven by her proven ability to deliver business value and elevate relationships to a strategic level while ensuring tactical delivery.
We wanted to know more about Claire’s perspective as an architect, so we reached out for her thoughts on several key questions.
Question: How did you get your start in the industry?
Answer: In my first corporate role out of college, I was asked to develop the requirements and selection criteria for a new IT help desk system. I was immediately hooked on understanding the “why”, clearly articulating the business’s need and determining criteria to demonstrate whether that need was met. Since then, I have worked in a plethora of diverse industries with the same outcome focus. Whether it was installing a LAN port in my suit and heels (showing my age here!), modeling business processes, or leading multimillion-dollar transformation efforts, I’ve found that each scenario is about solving a business problem and delivering business value from IT.
Q: What is your current responsibility and what is your typical day like?
A: Today I work with multiple DMI clients to ensure they realize business value from their technology investments. Providing both thought leadership and delivery execution, every day is different: I may be developing innovation maturity models, building an enterprise business capability model, driving process improvement, or facilitating strategic workshops. You may also find me defining product KPI dashboards that are traceable to business and IT OKRs to inform investment decisions.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: I love that I am able to work with multiple organizations, varied company cultures, and an array of incredibly talented people. While the context of each business is different, most organizations are wrestling with similar problems. It is a privilege to be a part of helping build solid architecture foundations that empower them to deliver business value from their technology investments. A key component of that strategy is establishing traceable measurement practices. Not only does it give me joy to see our client’s success tangibly visualized, I also get to work with an exceptional and dynamic DMI team while doing so!
Q: What trends in architecture are you looking out for the rest of 2023 and 2024?
A: There is increasing appreciation and drive toward the stability provided by architectural blueprints. Architecture has evolved from a nice-to-have to a necessity in today’s volatile environment. It provides a solid foundation for business agility, enabling the business to be more adaptable and flexible in responding to changing market conditions, evolving customer needs, and emerging technology. A well-defined, integrated, and continually measured and optimized architecture also guides investment decisions towards:
- Composable systems that can be easily reconfigured, replaced, or combined to create new products and services,
- reducing technical debt,
- enabling innovation and speed to market.
Increasingly, companies are investing in and establishing architecture departments, practices, and foundations that provide this solid platform from which to adapt and pivot, innovate, and measure and maximize their investments.
Q: What is one thing we can do to support or increase the women in architecture?
A: We need to pull women up! Provide guidance, mentoring, belief in, and opportunities for women in IT and in architecture. We are more productive, more creative, and able to drive better solutions when we have multiple perspectives looking at a situation versus any single, myopic view.
Women need a reliable support infrastructure where they can process, get help on how to problem-solve in their environments, and provide opportunities for each other to grow, mature and advance into leaders in their organizations and industries. The relational connectivity, coaching, and mentoring design of the new Women in Architecture forum means it is poised to play a big part in this much-needed support infrastructure.