Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In smaller organizations, the enterprise architect may also be the chief
technologist or lead developer. This can be acceptable in a small venue,
as the architect may be able to learn and consider all possible aspects of
the organizational technology needs. In larger organizations, it is impor-
tant to distinguish enterprise architecture from development and infor-
mation technology implementation. While nontechnical managerial staff
members cannot be effective enterprise architects because they lack the
necessary understanding of service interrelations, even effective IT profes-
sionals may be a poor enterprise architects if:
•
Their personal preferences for technology specification do not
provide the best opportunities for their organization as a whole.
Many organizations attempt to bypass the tendencies discussed in
Chapter 1 by placing a nontechnical individual into the CIO/chief
architect's position. While this may avoid the problem of informa-
tion technology preference, it creates a situation in which the pri-
mary decision maker responsible for architectural vision must rely
primarily on the advice of others—a situation akin to sheep asking
wolves to advise them. This also leads to project selection in isola-
tion, where a change in collaboration platform might be decided
on without considering the impact on related services such as an
organizational intranet portal or a customer management system
that leverages the collaboration platform for critical functionality.
•
Their vision lacks clarity and understanding of the needs of the
organization, or changes too often to provide a useful direc-
tion.
Nothing can doom an enterprise architectural effort more
effectively than a leader who does not know where the organiza-
tion is going. Fuzzy goals tend to lead to unremarkable results that
lack metrics for assessing success. Like a boat without a tiller, an
architect without direction tends to lead nowhere. Worse, in some
ways, is the architect whose vision changes with each new month's
trade journals or based on which stakeholders have most recently
argued their needs. An inconstant leader can cause implementers to
waste valuable time jumping from project to project, at times work-
ing only to undo what has just been partially completed because
the architect has just heard about the newest process-of-the-month.
Nothing illustrates more how lost a leader is than such wandering in
the wilderness of alternatives.
