Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Extreme Frustration in Enterprise Architecture
Imagine getting off a project that you didn't much care for to work on something stimulating, rewarding, personally gratifying only to be repeatedly dragged back for firefighting...
Sometimes the inverse is also true where you find you need help, have identified the right talent and they get dragged away to work on something they don't care to be on. Enterprise architects usually aren't measured based on technical excellence and demonstrated ability but more on perception management. How many times do you think an enterprise architect gets blamed for crappy software when they were the single person in an IT department innnocent of all blame because they advocated that the software be refactored for years.
Enterprise architects touch things early in the lifecycle of a project and sometimes there is despair when joining a project that is desperately need and even thoroughly funded but nothing can be produced because no one will stop analyzing and you either what they need or the reasons why they are being an impediment.
To add icing on the cake, have you ever been in a situation where the technical decisions are made by the least technical person where you had to be force fed their incompetence and then later get blamed for the resulting poor quality? For enterprise architecture to be successful, we need to fix the fundamentals. Stop worrying about perception management and abstract notions of business alignment and start worrying about the human aspects of technology...
| | View blog reactionsSometimes the inverse is also true where you find you need help, have identified the right talent and they get dragged away to work on something they don't care to be on. Enterprise architects usually aren't measured based on technical excellence and demonstrated ability but more on perception management. How many times do you think an enterprise architect gets blamed for crappy software when they were the single person in an IT department innnocent of all blame because they advocated that the software be refactored for years.
Enterprise architects touch things early in the lifecycle of a project and sometimes there is despair when joining a project that is desperately need and even thoroughly funded but nothing can be produced because no one will stop analyzing and you either what they need or the reasons why they are being an impediment.
To add icing on the cake, have you ever been in a situation where the technical decisions are made by the least technical person where you had to be force fed their incompetence and then later get blamed for the resulting poor quality? For enterprise architecture to be successful, we need to fix the fundamentals. Stop worrying about perception management and abstract notions of business alignment and start worrying about the human aspects of technology...
