...or did you stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
My apologies for my feeble attempt at humor, but it has been bothering me lately that there are so many people trying to pass themselves off as Enterprise Architects when they are really nothing of the kind.
I receive numerous resumes every day from people who have contacted me through either my company, my blog or one of my speaking engagements. There are a lot of good qualified professionals on the market that have a strong background in enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture (SOA). These people have an extraordinary opportunity currently to work on exciting, cutting-edge projects and get paid very well to do so.
It's the other group of people that contact me that I'd like to talk to you about. Maybe we can chalk this up to a simple semantic issue of a person's title, but what really qualifies someone as an 'Enterprise Architect'?
I have commented in the past regarding other blog posts that do a good job of laying a framework for interviewing Architects. But, in a nutshell, too many heads-down Developers consider themselves Architects without the ability to visually align all the technical aspects of an organization in one common framework. This does not even bring into account the indisposable need to comprehend the business goals of the organization.
Please don't take this as a 'shot' at Developers. I know many and they are excellent at what they do. Some could even move into an architecture role if they were given the opportunity to do so. But simply focusing on development does not an architect make. Some may claim that it is merely an 'artificial divide' between what constitutes a Developer vs. an Architect. But let's get real and realize that there is much more to the role of the Enterprise Architect than understanding development and coding. As a matter of fact, do Enterprise Architects even need to be technical?
