What do I do?

I’ve been pondering this simple question “what do I do?”. Not the simple what do I do question, but the really hard what do I do with a super capital “I“. It’s so easy to throw out something saying I’m an enterprise architect, or I work in IT and information architecture or I map processes and strategy so I must be a business architect with an IT twist. Sure I hold certificates in the fields of IT-architecture and business architecture, I’ve served under good and bad leadership and I’ve created great and not so great architectures. But does all this put me in any special architect role and is this what I do.

Most of the time I function as a pathfinder, scouting out the best strategy, the most suitable method or a really great service. How does that tie in to being in the field of Enterprise architecture? Am I an architect or have I become an Internet native, a nomad roaming the fields of the web looking for greatness. It sure sounds more exciting being a pathfinder, an ea-nomad an internet native. Maybe I’ll get to put pathfinder on my next business card instead of enterprise architect.

Ugh!

What if? Would you buy in to it?

I’ve been actively pursuing what I’d like to see in an offering related to the practice of enterprise architecture. Below is a fictive offering made to the community and all other stakeholders in EA, about a great service that would cater to most of the common needs.

• What if I exposed a service to you that gave you the ability to maintain all of your EA artifacts on any meta model you like
• What if the service could visualize all the relations and even some things you haven’t thought of yet
• What if this service came with ready made samples and explanations for most concepts in EA space
• What if the service I exposed was a true in the cloud application
• What if this service was localized for your usage
• What if this service could build upon your present material by importing, converting and exporting
• What if the service I exposed was more secure to use than your present service
• What if you and your users could have a say in how the user experience of this service would feel like
• What if this service had all the features of social computing and they where built in from start
• What if this service had awesome search built in to it
• What if this service had an open API attached to it
• What if the service I exposed guaranteed a drop in EA tools licensing cost with more than 90%
• What if this service was globally available
• What if the support for this service was better than what you get at your mommas house
• What if I could guarantee delivery of all this by 2009-12-31

Would you buy in to it?

The social graph of the EA world

I came across a piece of software that allows you to map out relations between search results from Google and Amazon. So I decided to map out the prominent terms of the enterprise architecture field, namely “enterprise architecture”, “method”, “framework”, “tool” and “Books”.

I’ll leave it up to you to draw any conclusions from these maps.

Map of Enterprise Architecture (Using the Google tool)

Map of Enterprise Architecture and Method (Using the Google tool)

Map of Enterprise Architecture and Framework (Using the Google tool)

Map of Enterprise Architecture and Tool (Using the Google tool)

Map of Enterprise Architecture and Books (Using the Amazon tool)

The tool came from Touchgraph and I found it by reading an interesting article from Business Week.