Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

Enterprise Architects, the very next time you interview someone, you need to be cognizant of what you are doing to destroy our profession. If you ask yourself, would you prefer (a) the perfect team player who doesn't rock the boat or (b) the one who is brave enough to stand up and fight for something rather than accept the watered-down group think that maintains the status quo at best (usually results in making most things worse). Now think for a moment of the distinction between who you say you will choose vs. who you actually choose...

Does your boss refers to IT exmployees as FTE's? Does your HR department do macro-level comparison of your robots FTE's to the robots FTE's that work for other companies so that they can ensure proper compensation? Will anyone at the executive level ever admit their strategy is to create robots? Proof of course is in their practices. Do they enlist process weenies to further assist in creation of best practices for robots and insist on checklists for pretty much everything IT does?

You should do your best to keep these robots away from the blogosphere as they might end up reading bloggers such as James Governor of Redmonk who may ask uncomfortable questions. It is best to have your robots stick to reading the research reports of large analyst firms. James Governor, Raven Zachary and other non-robot industry analysts in the blogosphere actually have strongly-held opinions which could cause a short-circuit in most robot-oriented architectures.

The best strategy for creating robots I have seen to date is hiring folks within an outsourcing context. Imported robots tend to not complain when micromanaged and make the perfect scapegoats. After all, by fully defining one's role and more importantly working diligently to stifle their curiousity and thus passion is the best way to turn your enterprise into a crappy place to work. Before you outsource, ask the outsourcers to kidnap all remaining process weenies.

Maybe the best things us enterprise architects can do is to flush ITIL, CMMI, the notion of best practices, Powerpoint and Visio, SOA all in the toilet and instead have the humility to let go and encourage folks curiousity and passion and finally turn ourselves into robots while everyone else in the enterprises kicks even more butt...