EA is it the role for you

Friday, after this week a day at home is good, yesterday the points at Rugby failed, so Euston St at 5pm was manic, in fact they cancelled all trains until 6pm, then you had too many people on the trains that were going north. Today is a day of speaking to journo’s and vendors, reviewing some documents and doing my expenses.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) an art or a science

For the bank holiday weekend I have decided to discuss the role of EA and in this blog concentrate on the capabilities needed to perform the role. In IT we believe everything can be decomposed to 1’s and 0’s: because that is the way the computer works, but EA is a discipline that attempts to cross the divide between the business world of £’s and NPV’s to that of the 1’s and 0’s.

Currently EA is in its embryonic state, by that I mean as a profession it is relatively immature, when compared to engineering where the status of Chartered Engineer (CEng) is recognised as a symbol of competence and ability presided over by a well structured standards organisation. It my contention that EA requires a similar rigorous body to standardise the skills and training needed to become an Enterprise Architect. Because only by raising the profile and making it recognisable and easy for employers to know that an individual has the skills to be an Enterprise Architect will the role become more organisational in its scope and therefore break-away from its current association with IT.

I believe that EA should be a discipline that reports to the CEO, and not CIO, as its purpose is to enable business strategy to be translated to executable programs that can deliver organisational value over the long-term