Keys to Thinking and Providing Services as an Architect

Enterprise Architects in 2020 are expected to understand the business and technology landscapes very well and the prominent demand to deliver critical advice and priority deliverables credibly and rapidly. To be able to provide such services, EA practitioners require, as basic knowledge, the criticality of having a solid method to frame initiatives in their respective contexts and to help provide useful visualizations quickly that help enable better decision making. Just as an architect for a house is expected to understand the zoning context for a house she is being asked to design, she is likewise expected to rapidly deliver visuals of different choices of styles, building materials, and time lines. She does this with templated viewpoints tied to patterns that she can customize for the circumstances, including budget constraints and targeted milestones. She follows established methods and incorporates modeling in her core offerings. Similarly, Enterprise Architects must know their evolving architecture landscapes extremely well and be able to provide rapid, solid, and even innovative recommendations to their stakeholders. They must have a customized framework and a set of tools to do this, as well as a keen understanding of which tools to use for which stakeholders and use cases — there is no generic method/framework nor silver bullet tool that architects can be provided upon completion of often very abbreviated training programs. This raises the question of how much and what kind of formal training Enterprise Architects should have. 

The majority of them, according to my experience, come up the IT ranks from programmer to solution architect and then to Enterprise Architect. Therefore  their training in the young discipline of Modern Enterprise Architecture is very limited at best. To address this, many take short courses such as in TOGAF, get their certifications and press on. Unfortunately, too many TOGAF trainers are in fact just focused on helping these accomplished IT professionals to get an EA certification, with TOGAF leading the marketplace. But they soon realize that book knowledge gained in a few days leaves them ill-equipped to actually set up and mature, or even just participate with confidence, in EA practices that are often developed from grass roots initiatives and which offer idiosyncratic services, often with no formal documentation. Furthermore, they have been “raised” for years, even decades in using diagrams, such as in PowerPoint and Visio, to create their architectural visuals. Maybe they do not even understand the difference between diagramming and modeling and are therefore at very low maturity on this dimension of the EA maturity scale. Almost none of them have even heard of a content metamodel for describing enterprise elements and the relationships between them, nor on how to use EA tools to do impact and what if analysis. Similarly, they have very little practice in separating the problem space from the solution space as they do their best to contribute to the planning of new initiatives, perhaps transformative ones. 

Because of the above shortcomings, I have found that Enterprise Architects need to know methods well enough to be able to customize them for their contexts. In addition, they should know at least one content metamodel inside and out. For these fundamentals, TOGAF and ArchiMate are great springboards. However, customization of methods is a difficult challenge and in fact is never adequately achieved, thus greatly undermining the possible maturity and success of the EA capability. Similarly, architects with knowledge of methods, even how to customize them, but very thin knowledge of content metamodels, are working in a kind of Tower of Babel zone. ArchiMate is a wonderful EA language that can add so much to the basic education of architects and therefore something I recommend that all architects learn, preferably in a formal setup with experts. Too often, those who teach themselves are often mistaken on many aspects of the language, just as someone who teaches himself golf is unlikely to ever achieve a low handicap. 

Furthermore, to more rapidly get to where they can, with confidence, combine method with modeling and start to move rapidly up the ladder of EA maturity, advanced EA training and even customized mentoring over a period of a few weeks/months can move incredibly value and huge ROI. For this reason, EA Principals offers Advanced EA Training, even customized for private courses, to greatly accelerate EA maturity and to thereby realize the massive opportunities that exist for EA to make a difference in even priority initiatives of Fortune 50 companies. We do not put such courses on the Website because they are scheduled based on demand, but we cannot recommend such advanced training, using myriads of use cases for hands-on practice, to help architects better think and deliver more rapidly as star architects.

Authored by Dr. Steve Else, Chief Architect & Principal Instructor