Business-Driven Architect

On his Science Library Pad blog, Richard Akerman likens the Enterprise Architect to a time traveler:

To be an Enterprise Architect is to live in a bit of a temporal disconnect from the rest of the world.

This disconnect is two-fold:
1) Architecture, to my mind, must be looking at the continuously receding 3-year time horizon.
That creates the critical bridge between the day-to-day and month-to-month activities of the organization, and the organization's stated 5-year strategic plan.
2) The people in your organization may not even be living in the present.  They may have a technological viewpoint that lags several years behind.

So you're in the meeting room in 2006, and you're trying to have a conversation based on where you think things will be in 2009, meanwhile, the organization is still back in 2001.

At the end of his post, Richard poses some questions I wanted to pass along to readers:

Anyone else have ideas on key metrics to qualitatively or quantitatively assess the success of the EA?

Any thoughts on bridging the time warp between 3 and 5 year strategic visions and the day-to-day of project and operations execution? 

Better ideas for moving the organization's technology thinking forward, rather than just "inform and be ready"?

If you have thoughts on the above, please jump over to Richard's post.

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