When technology infrastructure lines up with business projects like musicians in a marching band, you know you have a good enterprise architect on staff. But will you keep him when it's time to start handing out pink slips?

You will if you can make the case for this hard-to-define but critical IT position. An enterprise architect, or team of them, creates a model—usually with graphical software, but paper will do—of how your company works. That includes the business processes and the related technology as well as a common vocabulary for IT and non-IT people to use to discuss operations. The goal is a little thing called alignment.

The essence of the job "is about improving communication between the people with the problems and those who would solve them," says Leon Kappelman, cochair of the Society for Information Management's enterprise architect working group. "That's vital."

Believers such as Scottrade CIO Ian Patterson use the enterprise architect (EA) position in part to bring the IT group close to the internal customer. At the $1 billion brokerage, CEO Rodger Riney recently suggested to Patterson to send some EAs to User Summits with customers—people who trade stock online—to learn directly what services they want, Patterson says. "They get firsthand knowledge of what customers are saying" to translate into IT projects, he explains.

Achieving that impressive lockstep between business and IT takes time and practice, of course. The job of an enterprise architect is hard to master and sometimes hard to nail down.

Now, amid an economic downturn, a position like that—without concrete and measurable financial value or, typically, any direct reports—can be difficult to justify when the board of directors demands companywide layoffs. Yet don't let those obstacles induce you to cut the enterprise architecture job automatically when you must reduce staff, experts warn. You could dig your company a bigger hole. The EA is key to aligning business and IT, which in these recessionary times is more important than ever.

No Universal Job Description

So what does an EA do? The answer depends on who you talk to.

At some companies, the position emphasizes technology, as in the planning of companywide systems. A core objective, for example, is to ensure that all new software and hardware meet standards and work together.

However, a CIO makes better use of an enterprise architect by having him or her focus on the technical viability of product solutions while determining their economic value to the business, says Ken Zivic, a consultant at Forsythe, a technology advisory firm. This will result in an improved IT ability to make better business decisions while considering benefits, risk and the effects of new technology implementation, he says. "There are so many vendors pulling and tugging on IT organizations. EAs have to be a shield for that," he says. "A voice of reason."