The New Face of Enterprise Architecture

Digital business has put new demands on Enterprise Architecture professionals to make the connection between technology’s constant disruption and its impact on business goals and outcomes. According to Gartner, EA teams that do not refactor their skill sets from technology artifact generation to business outcome realization will marginalize their value and struggle to remain relevant.
Today’s Enterprise Architect
Today’s EA practitioners fall into two primary camps: the vanguard enterprise architect and the foundational enterprise architects. An innovation driver, the vanguard architect deals with technology disruptors and enterprise connectivity, while the foundational enterprise architect maintains enterprise technology and the systems of record.
While currently only making up 10 percent of EA organizations, the vanguard practitioner is emerging as the leader of the pack with an ability to make and communicate business decisions that navigate digital business and technological disruptors. Gartner predicts the number of these practitioners will reach 20 percent by 2016.
The Future’s Enterprise Architect
As we’ve talked about in recent posts, the future of EA puts the enterprise architect in a leadership role by driving strategy based on business goals and direction. Deliverables for this emerging breed of enterprise architect include strategic guidance from the C-suite and down, roadmaps, principles, standards, and best practices.
The diverse skill set of this version of the enterprise architect links digital business, social connectedness, and technology.
To build out these types of teams, organizations are looking to millennials who retain these competencies due to early exposure to technology and the digital world.
This is not to say that historical knowledge of EA practices and an understanding of modeling and IT structures is no longer valued, but skill sets need to evolve with business requirements. The new face of EA will succeed through fresh, big picture thinking combined with traditional application of models and data.
“The “New Face of EA” in many ways requires a “New Generation” of Enterprise Architecture professionals. The primarily IT-focused professional of the past — and some would argue the present — alone will not get the profession to where it needs to go. We need EA organizations comprised of people who understand business at least as well as technology with a reporting structure outside of IT. Creating this type of professional requires educational system changes, while also fostering more interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs.”
Brian Cameron, Associate Dean of Professional Master’s Programs, Pennsylvania State University, Smeal College of Business
Today’s reality is that pretty much any capability the business dreams up will require the technology department to figure out how to deliver it. This means an understanding of how this technology will not only impact its users, but the entire business ecosystem will be a highly valued contribution… and the New Enterprise Architect is best poised to deliver that insight.


According to Microsoft, “In today’s corporate environment, enterprise applications are complex, scalable, distributed, component-based, and mission-critical.”

I was taken by surprise the other day when I looked at my calendar and saw that we are well into August; and before you know it summer will be over and autumn will be upon us. Immediately I started thinking about the ritual year-end strategic planning session that generally looms around now. I’m sure many of you know of what I speak.

Forbes Contributor Jason Bloomberg recently wrote a few articles addressing the current state of Enterprise Architecture. In his 
In our last blog post, 
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has changed exponentially over the years with transforming from an IT-driven initiative to a business strategy necessity. EA as a field formally took shape in 1987 with the publication of John Zachman’s article 

We recently wrote about Enterprise Intelligence (EI) as a concept that delivers executives and decision makers with the insights they need to make more informed business and technology strategy decisions because of its enterprise transparency and visibility. In light of the recent wave of cyber security breaches it’s a good time to point out that EI insights also help with decisions related to everyday operations. In this case, strengthening cyber security

It’s been a month since Troux hosted more than 200 customers at our worldwide conference in Austin to talk about ways to make enterprise architecture (EA) a must-have business capability. Now that everyone has digested their Texas BBQ and cleared out their inboxes, we’d like to reflect back on what attendees experienced at this year’s Troux Worldwide Conference.
Our last post introduced the concept of enterprise intelligence (EI), 
Ben Geller, VP Marketing, Troux

Current events paint a picture of a finance sector plagued with “Technical Debt” resulting in security breaches, ATM lockouts, blocked debit and credit cards, and more. It often feels like as consumers we have little choice but to accept these faulty systems. But, the more I read about these challenges, the more the enterprise architecture (EA) side of my brain takes over. From an EA perspective, the break down started a long time ago when executives chose a wait-and-see approach to problem solving that consisted of applying system patch – after system patch versus wholesale upgrades or rebuilds. Looking back makes it clear that the sector can no longer be idle. Let’s start from the beginning. 
A traditional approach to Enterprise Architecture might suggest spending a significant amount of time (in some cases this could last as long as a year) gathering data from different parts of the business in the hope of building a holistic view of how the business looks today. Once you are sitting on this mass of data you may then consider EA tools to help you make sense of it all. To some people this seems a logical sequence– we’ll do the heavy data lifting on our end then call in the analytics guys to tell us what it all means. In reality this approach will often lead to wasted effort and set back the timetable for delivering value. As we discussed in a recent post, 