What is an Enterprise Systems Designer?

An enterprise systems designer is a computer science expert who creates, develops and implements customized technology solutions. They design enterprise-wide IT solutions that combine business processes, employee duties, operational data and hardware and software together. Their goal is to accomplish business objectives through centralized technology solutions.

Enterprise Systems Design

Enterprise system design projects start out with the company’s business leaders identifying an organizational process, system or operation that needs to be mapped, analyzed and improved. Enterprise systems designers determine the system’s objectives, conduct comprehensive operational analyses and establish how the proposed system should work. They then design a new or improved version that increases efficiency, improves production and meets business objectives. The actual building of the new enterprise system may be done in-house or outsourced to contracted systems developers and architects, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Enterprise systems designers use their prototype design to strategically develop an implementation plan to create or migrate to the new system. Almost all enterprise systems designers will use the same development model of analyzing the existing system, designing a proposed solution and implementing the plan. Many enterprise systems designers use a requirements analysis, which specifies the system’s functional and performance requirements, and a proposed system architecture, which presents a simulation system with proposed functions and architecture.

Current Enterprise System Evaluation

Enterprise systems designers will first analyze the organization itself to understand the organizational context of the project and the organization’s mission and objectives. It is important to understand the primary driving force behind the design project and what business constraints are imposed on the current system. Next, enterprise systems designers will determine how the current system works and how well it meets expectations for benchmarking and comparable best-practice purposes.

Enterprise systems designers must contrast the system’s current performance against the current business objectives in order to understand risks, weaknesses and improvement opportunities. Based on the information they gather, enterprise systems designers will create a road map for meeting new business goals by reducing risks and performance gaps. In most situations, they will identify two viable solutions that use opposite approaches. That is, they will recommend an incremental approach that improves the existing system’s architecture within the limits of the organization’s budget and operational constraints. They will also recommend a clean-slate approach that introduces an entirely new architecture.

The Ideal Enterprise Systems Designer

The ideal enterprise systems designer can present design recommendations that are specific, well-defined and within time and budget constraints. They will be equally talented in conducting development and improvement analyses for both incremental and clean-slate approaches. Enterprise systems designers should be skilled at incorporating past mistakes, lessons and successes into future projects. They need the organizational and analytical skills in order to assess, simplify, combined, reconfigure and rationalize designs.

The ideal enterprise systems designer will seeks the fastest and easiest solutions that deliver the best ROI. Some enterprise systems designers automatically insist on creating new systems and reinventing the wheel every time a technical problem arises. Enterprise systems designers will have strong project management skills that allow them to meet tight deadlines, pay strong attention to detail and work independently without supervision.

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An enterprise systems designer usually has a degree in software architecting, engineering or development. Enterprise systems designers may start out their careers as a software programmer or a computer network architect.