Is this really the job of an enterprise architect? To dig into the details of a devops team's mess?

It's more about giving the team and the overall strategy a thumbs up or down, so yes.

The job of senior people should mostly be to make sure the organisation runs smoothly.

If no one else is doing anything about the mess, then it falls to the senior person to sort it out.

As a rule of thumb:

- Ideally your people do the Right Thing by themselves by the magic of 'leadership'. - Second best: you chase the people to do the Right Thing. - Third: you as the senior person do the Right Thing. - Least ideal: no one fixes the mess nor implements the proper way.

I guess some people can achieve the ideal outcome with pure charisma (or fear?) alone, but I find that occasionally getting your hands dirty (option 3) helps earn the respect to make the 'leadership' work. It can also help ground you in the reality of the day to day work.

However, you are right that a senior person shouldn't get bogged down with such work. You need to cut your losses at some point.

Where I work, which granted is a very large company, the enterprise architects focus on ERP processes, logistic flows, how prices flow from the system where they are managed to the places that need them, and so on. They are several levels removed from devops teams. DevOps concerns are maybe handled by tech leads, system architects or technical product managers.

Makes sense. From datavirtue's comment is sounded like they joined a much smaller outfit without much in terms of established _working_ procedures here.