Would you like to increase your organisation competences on Enterprise Architecture ?

Most of CIOs and managers see as an achievement to increase the competences of their organisation. They have better chance to outperform their goals and are stronger to withstanding the setbacks. Moreover, the collaborators who crossed a gap, improve their loyalty to them and to the company. They lower they attrition rate.

Yet, with architecture and enterprise architecture, you may be surprised. Although you have trained all your architects, you may not quicken the pace of changes in your information system architecture. This is because architects are doing only a small part of the architecture, main design and decisions are done by Project managers. Some companies have even coined the name “Technical Project managers” to promote architects to management position. This means that if you have invested to roll-out a framework like TOGAF among your architects, you may likely miss your ROI.

So, when you are contemplating a plan to increase your organisation competences on architecture, you’d better analyse who is doing architecture and how it is done. In all Architecture domains – Business, Information  Systems, technology –  you have 2 types of architects : one manage context and environment, one manage business domain or solution. If architect is the name  granted to first, the second is often the project manager, or a technical solution expert to design implemention. On the other hand, if you want to change the way projects are doing architecture, by promoting architects, your will run out of  resource quickly, and you will loose your project managers.

It is better to recognize project manager role in domain or solution architecture. Since it is part of the overall process, he has to be included in training plans, and should report to Architecture board for this responsibility. TOGAF 9 didn’t forget Project managers in its skills framework.

In your organisation you have Enterprise Business architects, Enterprise Information System Architects, Enterprise Technical Architects who design all shared services for domains and solutions. Then, you have project managers in charge of developing solutions, for which they employ solution architects – business, data, application, technical -. Enterprise Chief architect manage all Enterprise Architects, he is responsible for tools, methods and process quality for keeping all design and implementations aligned with strategy.

Today, most of organisations have Solution architects who work for Project managers, and an enterprise chief architect often focused on Technical Architecture. Some have Enterprise Information System architects. Often business architecture is kept apart. Then, increasing your organisation competence require in some respect, organisational changes, process reengineering and a customized training plan.