Professional Capabilities
An Enterprise Architect plays a crucial (though often misunderstood and unappreciated) role in the planning and realisation of business systems that support the long-term goals and strategic vision of the enterprise. To be able to do this, the architect must first and foremost be a professional with a solid foundation of knowledge, skills and capabilities directly related to the creation of good Enterprise Architectures.
Thorough understanding and broad knowledge of architecture frameworks and methodologies and sound modeling skills are the foundation of the Enterprise Architect's professional capabilities: whatever other capabilities a person may have, without the specific professional Architecture arsenal, they cannot function as an architect.
An Enterprise Architecture is in many ways a technical construct: it provides plans, principles and guidelines that govern the future development of the IT components of business systems. This means that Enterprise Architects must understand IT well enough to make sensible decisions about its deployment in the business context, and evaluate its potential value and risk for the organisation. This requires a balance of both depth and breadth of IT knowledge: enough depth to truly understand the possibilities, limitations and complexities of the technologies involved; and enough breadth to be able to do so for the vast array of technologies available and those used throughout the Enterprise.
Since Enterprise Architecture is about long term goals and future plans, Enterprise Architects must keep their professional knowledge up to date and stay aware of new and coming trends and developments. To be able to correctly estimate the potential impact of new and emerging technologies, architects will have to be early adopters –exposing themselves to new technologies to gain enough personal knowledge and experience to confidently plan for (or against) integrating them in the Enterprise Architecture.
Another reason for Enterprise Architects to have solid technical knowledge and understanding is their role as leaders of technical staff. Technical staff tends to defer to demonstrated technical and professional knowledge, much more than to seniority, organisational position or political influence. To be able to successfully work with and lead the technical community within the organisation, the Enterprise Architect must be seen as the undisputed technical authority by that community.
It takes many years of supervised experience and development in the field to turn theoretical and practical knowledge into the
active capabilities necessary to effectively function as an Enterprise Architect. Job ads for architects' positions,
research and surveys taken in the Enterprise Architecture community confirm the importance of extensive experience to becoming
a successful architect.
The picture below shows some of the dimensions of professional experience considered to be essential for Enterprise Architects:
(Slide kindly donated
by Keith Frampton
of the Marlo Group).
