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July 24, 2008
The Lazy Enterprise Architect – Vision or Reality?
I recently attended a Gartner EA seminar in London. Hosted by the EA gurus Philip Allegra and Brian Burke, the seminar outlined the ”ideal” planning and implementation of an enterprise architecture program (great seminar – try to attend if you can some time).
During the seminar Phil introduced the idea about the ”lazy architect”. The role of the enterprise architect is to ensure that the business and IT are in alignment. And ”ideally”, when an EA program has been well established, the enterprise architect can sit back and just make sure that this alignment is happening.
However, as noted previously on this blog, my practical and academic expertise is that EA is often performed very different in different organizational settings. As Phil and Brian also noted, EA is not a clear-cut movement that can be adopted by any organization with similar results.
EA implementation is context dependent and typically comes with as much frustrations and desperation as accomplishments and joy. Working with many different stakeholders, both leadership and subject matter experts, to build a holistic view of the organization's strategy, processes, information, and information technology assets is not just a walk in the park in most organizations.
EA is still a fairly new discipline, and many organizations have just recently created the role of the architect. Maturity is probably a key word when we want find what Weber would call the ideal type ”lazy architect” – however, in my world the ”lazy architect” is still more vision than reality...
Please let me know how you experience your role as enterprise architect. In my research I try to understand how EA is adopted and your feedback is therefore very valuable to me. Post a note here or drop me an e-mail.
Posted by khm at 03:33 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack