Today’s enterprise needs coherent and effective IT architecture. There has been a revolution in business practices leading to the rise of the boundaryless organization, and the consequent requirement to architect a technical infrastructure for Boundaryless Information Flow™. According to Meta Group, technical architecture consistently ranks in the top 5 priorities of Global 2000 companies. But developing a good architecture means employing good architects, and this is a primary concern for the CIO. The emergence of a true IT architecture profession will help to address this concern, and there are signs that this is now beginning to happen.

Good IT architecture has never been so important. As Tom Kitt, Minister of State with special responsibility for the Information Society in the Republic of Ireland, puts it, the physical boundaries of business have mostly gone, and IT brings opportunities for people to work together in innovative ways. Interoperability is necessary for delivery of customer-centric services, and this can only be achieved through a common architecture.

The Future Store project of Germany’s Metro Group, the world's fifth-largest retail chain, provides a good example. Its aim is to create a new kind of retail environment with innovative customer features such as self-checkout, electronic shelf labelling, personal shopping assistant, and information terminals, using modern technology such as wireless networking and RFID. Its development involved over 50 partners, including product suppliers in technical areas such as software and RFID, retail goods suppliers, and service providers. It required a cross-organizational architecture to deliver business value, with low setup costs to accommodate changes of partners. Ard-Pieter de Man, a Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology who has been intimately concerned with the project, remarks that technology infrastructure is needed to support collaboration, and a good IT architecture will increase the benefits of an alliance.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) is the joint second largest bank in the world, with a staff of 250,000 people- 23,000 of whom are in IT. HSBC grew by acquisition and had major cost problems delivering and integrating software across regions due to differences in standards and practices. To solve these problems, its CIO sponsored a common architecture approach with a core team of 200 people and at cost of about $25 million.

Architecture is important for governments too. In the US, where the government spends $65 billion annually on IT, the Clinger-Cohen Act directs all Federal Agencies to do IT architecture. Based on the Act, the US CIO Council launched a number of enterprise architecture initiatives, which, according to Randolph Hite, Director of IT Architecture and Systems Issues of the Government Accountability Office, are having a significant impact on the increasing maturity of enterprise architecture in the Agencies.

The European Commission (EC), which has about 25,000 staff, three working languages, and over 1000 IT systems supported by teams at varying levels of IT maturity and professional practice, embraces an architectural approach too. Theo Vassiliadis, Head of Unit in the Directorate General for Informatics of the EC, says that the Commission uses enterprise architecture as a governance tool that enables strategy, portfolio management, and methodology to be applied across these teams based on standards.

IT architecture is the key to successful systems development in both business and government, and the IT architect works, not as a lone genius but as a member of a team with common standards and practices. But how can the CIO be sure of finding the right people and molding them into a disciplined and effective enterprise team?

IT is a modern phenomenon. But there is a concept that has been established for centuries in other areas such as medicine and the law that have similar needs to set common standards for the performance of highly qualified and capable people – the concept of a profession. A hospital hiring physicians will look at their professional qualifications, which reflect not only their medical knowledge but also their experience and their standing amongst their professional peers.

This concept is starting to be applied in the field of IT. There are already some professional IT architect development programs. IBM currently has 8000 IT architects worldwide, 75% of whom are in IBM Global Services, and most of whom are involved in customer-facing activities; it develops them through a professional program using a roadmap with skills capability checkpoints. Accenture has a large number of architects on its staff, and also develops architects and architecture practices for clients. It has an IT architecture training program that includes 73 architecture courses, such as “Security for Web Services”. A person might expect to reach the level of architect after five to six years, application architect after about nine years, and enterprise architect after about 12 years. These career development times are regarded as typical by many in the industry.

But separate corporate programs are not the answer. A CIO forming a team will look not for “IBM architects” or “Accenture architects”, but for IT architects whose skills and capabilities can be compared within a common professional framework. According to Stan Locke, Managing Director of the Zachman Framework Associates, an engineered approach to establishing the profession is needed - we should practice what we preach to the enterprise. Allen Brown, CEO of The Open Group, says that four things are needed for IT architecture to become a profession: a high standard of expertise, a recognised standard of best practice, skills that are transferable between enterprises, and a place for the practitioners to come together.

There are professional associations, such as the Data Management Association (DAMA), where IT practitioners can come together. And there are a large number of specialist IT accreditations, perhaps 600-700, but none of these focus on establishing an industry standard for IT architects. According to Meta Group’s Philip Allega, continuing shortages of experienced individuals, coupled with a rise in global architecture team development, has resulted in increased demand for a competent third-party evaluation body that can certify both knowledge and experience levels for potential enterprise architects. This gap is now being bridged by The Open Group, with its upcoming IT Architect Certification program. The new program will set a common standard to which IT architects can conform, whether working individually or in customer or supply-side practices, while allowing those practices to retain some individuality. It is supported by major IT architect practices such as those of HP and IBM, which recognise the need for an agreed, well-defined, and capable certification program. A professional framework is starting to appear.

Information Technology may be a young discipline as compared with medicine and the law, but its growth over the last fifty years has made it of comparable importance to the well-being and prosperity of people around the globe. The establishment of a proper professional structure for IT architects is now crucial for its future development. It will help CIOs in business and in government to form the teams needed to architect the infrastructure for our boundaryless world. We are at a point of change, where IT architecture will cease to be an ill-defined activity, and will become a profession with accepted standards of competence and conduct. IT architecture is coming of age.

For more information, please contact Dr. Chris Harding at c.harding@opengroup.org