March 09, 2005

WANTED: Enterprise Architects

(CIO Magazine via Webword) IT has grown so big that the CIO can't handle it all. To ensure that IT is always aligned with the business, you need an enterprise architect.

With a title like architect, you'd expect the job to be about building things, but a more accurate analogy might be city planner. Unlike a building, a company's IT architecture is never complete. Furthermore, an enterprise architect needs a high-level view that takes into account applications, data formats and hardware platforms, and how these three parts of IT interact, much the way a city planner has to consider a new building's impact on sewers, traffic and the electrical grid. The need for such knowledge is one reason that a systems or software architect is usually not a good candidate for enterprise architect.

The enterprise architect is responsible for ensuring that each and every one of a company's IT decisions is made with its impact on the entire organization kept firmly in mind. It is the architect who prevents an organization from investing in a technology that it will eventually have to replace. It is the architect's job to look for common business processes throughout an organization so that the services IT creates can be reused. For example, when IT is designing a mortgage approval application, the architect's job is not simply to make sure it will benefit the business unit that requested it, but to guarantee that it can be used by every business unit that touches upon the mortgage approval process.

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Posted by Don at March 9, 2005 09:33 AM

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