With Business Foundations Shaking, Good Enterprise Architects Are Hard to Find

Business leaders are scrambling to take their organizations deeper into the cloud, leverage the growing amount of data about their customers, and protect their companies from new security threats. Enterprise architects are usually their first call when it comes to bringing order to IT business process chaos, but EAs are also having to adapt to the very same trends impacting corporations.

Those tasked with helping organizations better manage their processes are themselves having to manage a lot of change these days.

Enterprise architects are looking at several trends impacting their roles in the business world -- the growth of cloud computing, the arrival of big data, more security challenges and the overall rate of technological advances.

These are the topics discussed at conferences, and the feedback from EAs at these events ranges from struggles in defining their roles so they can remain relevant, to embracing the new opportunities that can help businesses drive transformation.

A panel of enterprise architecture experts discussed the trends, challenges and opportunities in their field at the recent Open Group Conference.

The panelists included Chris Forde, general manager for Asia-Pacific and vice president of Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group; Iver Band, vice chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and enterprise architect at The Standard, a financial services company; Mike Walker, senior enterprise architecture adviser and strategist at HP and former Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell; Henry Franken, the chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and managing director at BIZZdesign, and Dave Hornford, chairman of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group and managing partner at Conexiam.

The discussion was led by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dana Gardner: When it's a dynamic environment, lots of change, lots of movement, the enterprise architects' value can go up. If things were slow, constant and predictable, perhaps their value wouldn't be as high. Any thoughts about that?

Henry Franken: Well, sure. What you see is that the challenge within large organizations on business transformation is increasing and the number of good enterprise architects is small, so their value increases. It's simple mathematics.

Read more here:
With Business Foundations Shaking, Good Enterprise Architects Are Hard to Find