How much time on average do you spend nurturing your business relationships?

Even if you think you already do this a lot, I think it will be even more important this year as we focus on connection and belonging in organisations. The idea is to be 'sticky' with employees and our other business relationships, to actually show we care about them.

Agree with Greta. A lot is the answer here.

It's a lot. You can never underestimate the importance of a relationship, especially in this abstract architecture world, and that applies to both the business, as well as your developers. Developers and engineers are the ones who actually make the architecture real, so you have to be close to both groups and it takes work. I spend quite a bit of time on that; it's why I end up working in the evenings and on the weekends. Once you build those relationships, you have so much work. They come to you.

I would recommend that any EA — especially somebody new who's trying to learn the craft of architecture — spend almost 60% of their time deployed to the business to learn as much as they can. I go to the meetings for other business units (BUs), because you can hear about what they are trying to do directly from them. Sit on the other side for developers in the operations meetings as well. Look at root cause analysis — like with incident management — to cover the gamut in order to understand and build a relationship with them.