The Open Group: Certify Enterprise Architects Like Accountants and Lawyers - First Look

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January 29, 2007
The Open Group: Certify Enterprise Architects Like Accountants and Lawyers

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Executive Summary:

The role of the enterprise architect is changing as business clamor for as IT solutions that embody and empower business needs.

“Many organizations now have managed to break down the barriers and silos within and between their enterprises and get people working cross-functionally,” notes Allen Brown,president and CEO of The Open Group, a not-for-profit consortium that brings together firms based on open standards and global interoperability.

But, notes Brown, the data these people require is “buried in siloed applications that were constructed for very good reasons -- and will remain for a long time within the silos.” So the new breed of enterprise architect will “need to rise up above that and not just take a single-application view, but take more of a city planner view across the enterprise,” Brown added.

On a higher level, the Association is looking to elevate the profession along the lines of accountants and lawyers.

“We’re going to promote the employment of certified professionals, establish standards of ethics and codes of conduct and generally accepted architectural principals which are based on generally accepted accounting principles,” said Brown, who went on to detail the benefits for individuals and employees.

“For the individuals, we’re enhancing their career opportunities and promoting their value to current and prospective employers and providing them with a portable qualification,” Brown pointed out.

When employees hire a certified architect, they will actually “know that they come with a certain level of skill and experience provided they’re members of the Association and therefore, you’re not teaching them from scratch,” noted Brown, who urged listeners to visit the http://www.opengroup.org Web site to develop their resumes with the aid of available online mentors.

To that end, The Open Group – long known for their popular IT certification programs -- are now creating a new Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) to allow all levels of enterprise architects to enhance their professional skills and contacts.

The new architects must have “the expertise that spans business IT applications and data architecture; they’ve got to have a broad understanding of each,” Brown notes. “They don’t need to be deep technical experts, but they need to have a sufficient understanding of technology, but they also need an appreciation of the business side … and they’ve got to be capable of aligning IT with tangible business goals.

Over 2000 practitioners have already been certified in The Open Group’s TOGAF architect framework and architecture development method -- and Brown notes that one of the initial activities for certification involve adapting architecture development method to the specific requirements of an organization.

“The second and more recent certification program,” Brown noted, “is ITAF, which involves an extensive resume and a board review with three one-hour interviews with peers who are certified and understand and confirm that the person in question does have the skills and experiences capable of being an IT architect.”