The Enterprise Architect

Are you an Enterprise Architect. If you are you probably have little interaction with others of your ilk. Your one of a few in your company or working in a big consultancy house and always busy being billable.

If like me your are an EA you will find this panel discussion an interesting read about what your peers are thinking about in terms of your craft in todays climate. The transcript is from "The Open Group's 22nd annual Enterprise Architecture Practitioner's Conference in London"

There are some interesting comments such as

42 percent of the organizations have their enterprise architects actively involved in the strategic planning process

or

The point is that an enterprise architect needs to understand the mechanics of management. He needs to understand how decisions are made at the top level, and he needs to have an approach of presenting what he's doing and what he suggests in a way that is understandable and traceable for the most senior decision makers in the organization. We're basically moving towards management consulting.

and

Our EA team turns up with the best thing since sliced bread that they have been working on in a hothouse environment for the last three months, which will feed all known starving people across the world.

It doesn't help me select the business in terms of value. Recognizing value in terms of what the customer, in our case the actual user, wants is critical. EA should be much more physical, politically savvy, and much closer to their customers.

Go on, if you are an EA you will want to have a read. I know I did, which is funny because today my title changed from "Enterprise Architect - Virtualisation" to "Enterprise Architect - Virtualisation & Cloud". With that new title my wife now really has no clue as to what I do for a living.

Rodos