Why choose an Enterprise Architect?

As one who has come from electrical and computer engineering with experience building infrastructure from instrumentation to Information Technology, I find it hard to explina to people what I actually do as an Enterprise Architect.  As you can guess there are major misunderstandings when people hear the word "Architect" or "Architecture."


Basics : "Gentlemen, this is a football" - Vince Lombardi
Architecture in its basic form is to "a unifying or coherent form or structure" (Merriam-webster dictionary).  It is really expected to bring together complex components into a coherent system like "systems thinking"

An enterprise architect is the one that is able to maintain and grow your organization, he/she is always able to drive all the organization's sub-systems towards a coherent goal.  So what can an enterprise architect do for your organization, simply put an enterprise architect can impact your organization by doing three things  (just highlighting the broad things I have done almost for every customer that I have supported)

• Maximize benefits 
• Reduce wastage 
• Minimize risk 

Maximizing benefits in your organization is all about bringing together all the logical assets, business process and business units of your organization to an efficient collaboration.  This is much like the "Assembly line" efficiency but at a higher logical level.  The handover between business units and inter-dependencies between various parts of an organization are brought together when an enterprise architect plays his role.

Reduce wastage is a big topic in every organization whether it is called "cost cutting", "trimming" or "consolidation", is the very act of removing or reducing wastage.  Recently it seems like "Consolidation is the new black!" , it is needless to say that all consolidation have not ended up in saving costs.  The enterprise architect's job is to identify strategies for true reduction of cost or wastage of resources in the organization.  An enterprise architect is able to realize true cost reduction and not just paper gains.

Minimize risk is no longer a new thing in todays information driven economy.  Every few weeks we hear of a cyber incident that puts an organization at risk and cause grief for many of the C-level executives.  An enterprise architect is driving the organization towards minimizing of risk involved in gaining new efficiency and emerging into new markets.

If the complexity of these type of tasks appeal to you, you are desiring the job of an enterprise architect!  If you are looking for such input as C-level executive ensure you are getting the right support through an EA program and EA board.