Are Enterprise Architects the "Miltons" of Their Organizations?

StewBeans writes: InfoWorld recently pointed out that the "architect" part of enterprise architect is a misnomer, because what they are building can't be a static, unmoving structure or it will fail. Businesses need to remain fluid and flexible as technology and consumer behaviors evolve, so modern enterprise architects must "develop frameworks with constant change as a first principle." The business value of these frameworks, however, is often called into question, and EAs have even been called the "Miltons" (as in Milton from Office Space) of the enterprise. If the field of enterprise architecture is changing to focus more on digital transformation, how does that compete with or compliment IT's role in the enterprise, which is also focused on digital transformation? The enterprise architect of BJ's Wholesale breaks down his responsibilities and addresses some myths about the EA role in this article.

Comments

Re:I don't know about your org..

[jellomizer]

"Enterprise" software is a scam.
It became popular after the Dot Com bust. Because organizations decided to Can most of their IT Staff. Meaning much of it custom software infrastructure cannot be maintained. Business being like most businesses suffer from an inferiority complex that somehow they are not running as well as the rest of the industry, not really realizing the rest of the industry has similar issues. So they drop their custom stuff, fire their programmers and go with "Enterprise" software, that promises "Best Practices" expecting the vender to do actual research in best practices. But that only means it is what they programmed the system to do by default.
Now here is where it gets sneaky. There isn't any real "Best Practices" because every organization is different. You may be more expensive but want a better customer experience, you may be cheaper and avoid all the useless people talk. Every organization is different and has different needs. So these "Enterprise" Architects are often brought in, each one costing twice of your developer who you canned and in numbers greater or equal to the amount of people you had fired. To customize the software to handle the difference. (AKA Re-programming it) now you have your more expensive semi-custom built product, that doesn't run nearly as well. with a team of expensive consultants you dare not to let them get reassigned because your infrastructure is now dependent on it
Just because you didn't want to keep your development staff, you have hired a more expensive and less effective development staff.