Enterprise Architecture

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…

Evolution of the CIO Role: Is Your Organisation Ready?

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Even as the initial feedback loop on my previous post “Will your organisation need CIO by 2020” is getting completed, I came across this very topical post by Jessica Twentyman, titled “Do CIOs need to shout louder?”. She quotes a provocative piece of research from management consulting firm Oliver Wyman and the US-based National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) suggests that their voices simply aren’t being heard in the boardroom. While almost all of the 204 company directors surveyed acknowledge that IT will have a significant impact on their company over the next five years, it appears that many boards do not have the skills or information they need to manage IT risk effectively.

This topic is linked to the question of how will the role of CIO evolve in coming years? I had written another post a few months back on CIO evolving to become a Chief Innovation Officer for instance. To refer some relevant extracts….

“Comparing the typical role of CIO (information) with that of CIO (innovation) – I do see some natural extensions of abilities which a competent CIO should possess. A good CIO should understand the language of the organisation as he / she serves a cross-section of business unit customers. Prototyping should be one of the core abilities for a CIO. And cross-delivery functions of modern IT dependent organisations should help him / her to unlock the creativity. So on the face of it a good competent and credible CIO should be easily double up as CIO (innovation).”

The tricky question to be tacked though is will an organisation allow it’s CIO to branch out? For instance I had written…..“The question however is will organisations trust or want their technology functions to lead path to innovation. Or would they rather drive this from commercial, functional or marketing perspective? It can also be argued that, CIOs are already one or two steps ahead in the game of innovation given their leadership in automation, optimisation aspects. Either way the CIO (information) should play a major role in enabling and making the innovation plans successful.” 

And Oliver Wyman and NACD is not the only recent study to suggest that CIOs’ skills and input are not sufficiently valued at board level. When research company Gartner recently conducted a survey with the Financial Executives Research Foundation, it found that “the chief financial officer is increasingly becoming the top technology investment decision-maker in many organizations.” The survey reports,“In 41 percent of organizations, the senior financial executives (mostly CFOs) who responded to the survey viewed themselves as being the main decision maker for IT investments. This response occurred in most situations where IT reports to the CFO, but it also occurred in other reporting models”

So even if the CIOs are ready for evolution of their role will the organisation have enough trust for them to take charge of matter beyond IT?

Image credit – digital art

Metastorm and Microsoft meet in the clouds with M3

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Designed to bring modeling to the masses, OpenText’s Metastorm M3 is now even more accessible as a cloud-based application on Microsoft’s Windows Azure Marketplace. To be included, M3 had to undergo specific certification by Microsoft in addition to its prior certification as a Windows Azure solution. This makes Metastorm M3 the only enterprise-class business planning […]

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A week in Tweets: 31 July – 06 August 2011

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Another somewhat-delayed week’s-worth of Tweets and links, organized in the usual way with the usual categories and the usual ‘Read more…’ break: Anything to do with enterprise-architecture and all the other usual business-big-picture stuff: tetradian: [post] The is-ness of business http://bit.ly/pR0YbC #entarch tetradian: [post] Questions on business-model to enterprise-architecture http://bit.ly/pD8pRZ #entarch #bizarch #bmgen (for @ArtBourbon) […]

More on that enterprise-architecture ‘help needed’

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Given the responses to my previous post ‘Guess I could do with some help here…‘, seems it’d be useful if I clarify a bit more what kind of help I most need. (Or we need, rather, as an industry and discipline: probably the only ‘I’-part here is that I seem to be one of the […]

Knowledge, process, people, and enterprise-architecture

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Reading KCore‘s excellent blog-post ‘High quality, High Impact KM: Start with the right questions‘, this early section of the article caught my eye: I’ve set out my stall when it comes to KM and by now it should be pretty clear that I believe that successful KM outputs are reliant on people.  I also strongly believe […]