Ever wondered what it takes to be an enterprise architect? I’ve been working in the field for some time now. I don’t just do enterprise architectures, I train and mentor other people who are or aspire to be enterprise architects. From time to time I see this question arise on blogs, social networks and among peers and customers, it’s always the same – What is an Enterprise Architect, what skills do they need, what’s the field of expertise and so on… To get past this confusion and not to try to define it by myself I thought I’d use the market forces to define it for us all. I copied the job descriptions of 87 of the enterprise architecture jobs available at monster.com and pasted it into the fantastic tool http://www.wordle.net/. The result you see below could perhaps be the mother of all enterprise architect job descriptions.
The Mother of all EA job descriptions - Display 3
There is three different images although they all contain the same text, they are just variations on the presentation formats available.
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- The Mother of all EA job descriptions – Display 1
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- The Mother of all EA job descriptions – Display 2
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- The Mother of all EA job descriptions – Display 3
It’s disappointing to see how small “communicate” and “communication” are on this diagram. That’s a critical part of being a successful EA.
Great exercise, I’m going to have pass this along to fellow EAs. What suprised me is that alignment or facilitate do not show up.