What is an enterprise architect to do in 2008?
So, a new year has begun and I am sure each of us have made a series of unachievable resolutions yet again this year :-). For enterprise architects out there who have made resolutions to progress their visions and practices, some advice.
We are getting into a potentially dreaded 'R' (recession) economically. Markets are expecting to see a bit, central banks are at a loss between managing creeping inflation and spurring demand and providing a support harness post the sub-prime fiasco. Pressures on IT budgets will be increased and transitively on enterprise architecture. What is an enterprise architect to do?
My suggestion is to bank on transformational initiatives, the time to invest is now. Winning in the turns should be the party line.
EA initiatives should focus on process transformation and outsourcing; enhancing decision making by defining an information architecture and leveraging service oriented principles to reduce application portfolio complexity and redundancy.
So to keep it simple, resolve to transform and 'cut-out-the fat'. This means you need investment dollars to prepare the journey into a lean, mean, enterprise that can pounce on opportunities as the economic tide turns.
