This Place is Taken: Against the Enterprise Architect as God (or not)

Friday, November 30, 2012

Against the Enterprise Architect as God (or not)

Against the Enterprise Architect as God (or not):
Over the last two years, I have been gaining experience on the Architecture side of the IT world, as a Technical Architect, as an Integration Architect and most recently as a Solution Architect.
I have some aspirations, which may or may not be realised, to gain experience as an Enterprise Architect in my next role.
It was therefore with some interest that I read this article, The enterprise architect’s Achilles heel, by Mark McDonald, in Technology Spectator, this morning.
I thought the article was very interesting because, having been reading a bunch of job adverts for EA roles, you would certainly get the feeling that the company was looking for a god-like figure as their new enterprise architect!!
In my experience, all the high-level architects I have worked with recently, did not have an omniscient view of the enterprise at all. In most cases, they had a rough idea of how things worked in any given area and had to ask questions in order to get a greater understanding. They would be the first to admit that they did not know everything.
In many meetings I attended, many of the attendees. who were working as solution and/or end-to-end architects, were often speaking about topics about which they only had the vaguest knowledge or understanding!
This was in a telecommunications company, which are by their very nature, extremely complex; so it is not really surprising to me that this was the case.
All enterprises are complex in their own way and I quite agree with the author that you cannot compare an enterprise to a plane or a building and, therefore, an enterprise which gives ultimate control to an enterprise architect, who is after all just human and therefore fallible, is probably setting itself up for problems down the line.
Read the whole thing, as they say!!

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