6 templates for solutions architects

A solutions architect is an essential role used to align a company’s business goals with its IT services and software products. A person in this role is good at communicating with technical and non-technical audiences and has a good understanding of the business side of operations. This way they can facilitate communication between IT and the business side to ensure that technical solutions align with business needs.

In this article, we will discuss six Lucidchart templates that can help you to more easily complete your daily solutions architect tasks and responsibilities. 

Current vs. future state flowchart

A current state map is used to identify what your company currently has and uses to get work done. This includes resources, materials, processes, roles, people, and so on. It’s a good visual overview of what your company does to get a product out the door. 

A future state map represents where you want your company to be. It’s all about making improvements so work flows more smoothly. You use this type of map to examine what kind of changes you might need to make and to identify how you might make these changes (new or upgraded equipment, new hires, different supply chain, redesigned framework, etc.)

The current vs. future state flowchart template combines these two types of flowcharts into a single document. It helps you to easily see what you have while giving you insight into where you want to go.

Business capability map

Lucidchart’s business capability map template can help you to:

• Discover gaps between expected and actual performance
• Determine how well or how poorly business capabilities are supported by available applications
• Use a common visual language so communications remain open across multiple departments, regardless of technical knowledge
• Align business and IT to ensure better decision-making and better application development
• Determine what needs to be done to accomplish business strategies

Functional decomposition diagram

Use this functional decomposition template to help you to determine if your projects are on target by looking to see if smaller sub-functions are creating bottlenecks that impede the process. Also, by breaking down the complex into simpler parts, it's easier for you to help key stakeholders understand the overall process.

System landscape

If your company only produces and sells one piece of software, then a model of that software’s architecture is probably all you need. But it’s more likely that your company develops a suite of software solutions—and it’s likely that you are responsible for multiple software systems. A system landscape diagram can help you to understand how these software systems fit and work together in an enterprise. It’s basically a high-level map that gives you a visual representation of the software systems at the enterprise level.

Lucidchart’s system landscape diagram template can help you to create this map, and help you understand how specific products or technologies fit into a specific solution. 

UML class diagram

This UML class diagram template can help you to visually document your system’s classes, attributes, operations, and the relationships among all of these components.

ER diagram

This ER diagram template can help you to define entities and relationships and document your database structure.

All of these Lucidchart templates are cloud-based and can be accessed by team members at any time of the day and from any location in the world. This makes it easy for distributed and hybrid teams to collaborate on the same documents in real time no matter where they are located.