Enterprise Architecture

IT-centrism, business-centrism, capability and process

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My earlier post ‘IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture‘ seemed to touch a nerve with quite a few folks: tetradian: [post] IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture http://bit.ly/p8kfqf (thx @dougnewdick) #entarch tonia_ries: The only thing that should be at the center of any business is the customer. @krcraft @tetradian krcraft: Agree, if staff also inc. as customers RT @tonia_ries […]

Back to the roots for EA toolset metamodels

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Time to get back to the themes from the post ‘More on that enterprise-architecture ‘help wanted’‘, with a focus on toolsets and metamodels. The usual approach to toolsets – just about any kind of toolset, as far as I can tell – is to describe the overall context, knock up a metamodel, and then build […]

IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture

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All right, I admit it: I allowed frustration to get the better of me in the previous post, ‘How not to define business-architecture‘. But the real point is this: IT-centrism is killing enterprise-architecture. Gartner made that clear some months back (apologies, can’t find the link…) in their ‘Hype Curve’ on EA: the IT-centric view of […]

How not to define business-architecture…

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Oh no, not again… Having all but crippled enterprise-architecture for the past decade with a muddled mess of myopia and misdefinitions, it seems Open Group are hell-bent on making the same kind of mess in business-architecture… I need to be upfront about this: I don’t regard Open Group as ‘the bad guys’. Far from it: […]

What I do and how I do it

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What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why? That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘: On a selfish note… It’s apparent that […]

What Does an Enterprise Architect Do ?

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Business Technology Strategy

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are
  • Your organization’s business and technology strategy and rationale
  • Your competition (products, strategies and Processes)
  • Your company’s business practices
  • Your Technology Portfolio
  • Influence business strategy
  • Translate business strategy into technical vision and strategy
  • Understand customer and market trends
  • Capture customer, organizational and business requirements of architecture
  • Prepare architectural documents and presentations
  • Visionary
  • Entrepreneurial

Organizational Politics

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are
  • Who the key players are in the organization
  • What they want, both business and personal
  • Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
  • Listen, network and influence
  • Sell the Vision, keep the vision alive
  • Take and retake the pulse of all critical influencers of the architecture project
  • Able to see from and sell to multiple viewpoints
  • Confident and articulate
  • Ambitious and driven
  • Patient and not
  • Resilient
  • Sensitive to where the power is and how it flows in your organization

Consulting

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are
  • Elicitation techniques
  • Consulting frameworks
  • Soft Skill techniques
  • Build “trusted advisor” relationships
  • Understand what the business people want and need from the architecture
  • Understand what the developers want and need from the  architecture
  • Help developers see the value of the enterprise architecture and understand how to use the technology successfully
  • Committed to others’ success
  • Empathetic and approachable
  • An effective change agent and process savvy
  • A good mentor and teacher

Leadership

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are
  • Yourself
  • Set team context and vision
  • Make decisions stickp>
  • Build teams
  • Motivate
  • You and others see you as a leader
  • Charismatic and credible
  • You believe it can an should be done and that you can lead the effort
  • Committed, dedicated, passionate
  • You see the entire effort in a broader business and personal context

Technology

What You Know

What You Do

What You Are
  • In-depth understanding of the domain and pertinent technologies
  • Understand what technical issues are key to success
  • Development of methods and modeling techniques
  • Modeling
  • Trade-off Analysis
  • Prototype, Experiment, and Simulate
  • Prepare architectural documents and presentations
  • Technology trend analysis/roadmaps<
  • Take a systems viewpoint
  • Creative
  • Investigative, Practical, Pragmatic, and Insightful
  • Tolerant of ambiguity, willing to backtrack, seek multiple solutions
  • Good a working at an abstract level

Risks and Rewards

Risks

Rewards
  • Responsibility without corresponding control
  • A lot of resistance and disappointments along the way
  • Often encounter others that believe they have a better idea or solution
  • Focus on interesting and complex issues
  • Opportunity to advance to very high levels in the organization with business and technical focus (rather than personal and fiscal)
  • Opportunity to make an enormous difference to the company and clients

Source: IFEAD

Posted via email from Jeffrey Blake – The Enterprise Architect | Comment »

Monet revisited (or: non-traditional approaches to developing TOGAF® Next)

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Enterprises are changing and we need to understand them in non-traditional ways. A lot of the best ideas come from unexpected directions, and in the next iteration of TOGAF®, doesn’t it make sense to incorporate them to make EA more adaptable and less…