The Forbes article Change As Core Competency: Transforming The Role Of The Enterprise Architect and it kind of reflects how my role is shifting at my organization. Even though I’m a manager of consultants and developers, my role has been starting to shift towards and enterprise architect role. It’s tough to call it that but it’s definitely a watered down version of the role. As I’m taking EA classes and part of the leadership team at work, I feel the need to help formalizing strategy and truly understanding the vision as a team where we want our company to head. Every leadership meeting, I ask the same questions to the owners of my company “what area do you think we should focus on next”” or “is there a certain area of an industry such as, IT security, you want to focus on?”. The same answer is always given, I don’t know that’s why we’re relying on you guys the leadership team to define that.
In my organization, I can already foresee that traditional EA will not be successful. We don’t have a CIO or a CTO. Instead we have a leadership team with the owners (CEO and COO) providing the final say. For our internal purposes, I’m leveraging the knowledge of my coursework especially from EA 872 with relation to the Gartner toolkit for EA. I just recently met with each department to document trends that are happening internally and externally. I also did competitive analysis of large consulting firms to see what types of services they offer. Then I created a future state diagram to help with a starting point of where I believe my organization should be heading based on the trends and my competitor research.
I believe until my organization becomes a larger or until we offer an EA consulting service and need to devote more time to that, I’m going to be an individual who is an advocate for change by proposing future states. Contrary to the Forbes article, my organization can’t focus too much on the current state and making it better because the entire line of business is focused around one platform. In order to grow, we need to branch out and provide more business value by offering services that may not be large pain points at the surface but instead helps start the conversation to larger efforts. By proposing future states based on research, I believe it will help form a strategy for the leadership team and help the organization embrace change.