Questions for an Enterprise Architect

Erik Dörnenburg answers: What is Enterprise and Evolutionary Architecture?, discussing 4 issues: Turning strategy into execution, Ensuring conformance, Where do the architects sit? Buying or building?

A very nice talk I'd like to share here on the blog. It's essentially about architecture, especially targeting enterprise architecture, the do's and don'ts etc.

A nice quote regarding the often mismatched metaphor about the "architects" role:

What I want to call myself but couldn't get it through our departments was...I wanted to call myself a gardener. I'm sowing seats and I'm growing new plants and I am tending to them, making sure they're alright, making sure they have enough water. Some are more easy, some more difficult. [...] The gardener metaphor works much better than the architects metaphor but it doesn't sound as cool.

It really should be like that. An architect should be one trying to use his competencies to make things easier, to help solve problems at a higher level, but at the same time he should "eat his own dog food" (it is this like you're saying it, right?). Imposing an architecture at a high level, forcing it to be implemented is completely non-sense. An architect needs to work with the system he designs, basically he needs to experience it.

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