Enterprise Architects: Increasingly Important, But Hard to Find

The Open Group (TOG) recently held their annual conference in San Diego.   While topics at this years conference ranged from Cloud Computing to Cyber-Security and to Interoperability and SOA, but a major focus of the meeting was Enterprise Architecture.   Dana Gardner mentioned in his take-aways from the Open Group conference that the role of the Enterprise Architect (EA) is rapidly changing.  Enterprise Architects need to be increasingly savvy, not only with technology, but also business.

The job of the Enterprise Architect is to  translate business requirements into an IT infrastructure that meets those requirements.  While that’s easy to say, it turns out that there are really few people with the right qualifications for being a good Enterprise Architect.

Steve Nunn, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at the Open Group, when asked if the job of the EA is one that remains relevant, said that at “the Open Group and the AOGEA we’re seeing significant growth and interest in the area of EA. In the association, it’s individuals becoming certified and wanting to join a professional body for their own purposes and to help the push to professionalize EA.  Within The Open Group it’s entities and organizations. Whether they be commercial, governments, academic, they are regularly joining The Open Group Architecture Forum. So, it’s far from dead and in terms of the importance of business overall, EA being relevant to business.”

The Open Group believes that the proper education is needed to be able to train and bring up to speed more individuals who can take on and do well with the job of Enterprise Architect.  To facilitate the process of education, the Open Group has created a standard architecture framework called TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework)  that can be used for building information systems.  The TOGAF framework dates back to the mid-1990’s and is now in its 9th revision.  Authors and contributors of the framework document include some of the world’s leading IT customer and vendor organizations.  The aim of the framework is to help the EA build a better IT solution.  Much of the activity at the recent Open Group conference centered around skills training and certification for the TOGAF framework.