In general I agree with what you are saying. And I like your definition of a strategic practitioner, however I would see that more as an ideal to aspire to, rather than a necessary condition to being an EA. Another thing I’m not convinced about is your distinction between skills and talents, I know from experience that you can teach conceptualisation and communication – however all of the items on both lists are important. One skill/talent that I think you are missing is “analysis” – the ability to take something (an idea, a problem) and break it into appropriate pieces to facilitate understanding, problem-solving and solutioning etc.

Doug

I really like the analysis in terms of skills vs talents, specialist vs generalist. These are things we struggle with on a daily basis in both consulting and teaching. As you already pointed out, skills can be learned. One can learn how to do decomposition for a new IT-system, how to do functional analysis to design a new business process, or how to implement a six-sigma approach in an enterprise.

Learning these skills takes time, which is why it is to be expected that there are few young (under thirty) good enterprise architects. Especially since they also need the proper mindset and talents.

I’m not so sure about the term ‘strategic practitioner’ though. I think the EA community will like it, but the strategic management community wont as they (correctly!) feel the term ‘strategy’ is applied to too many things already.

IT Linchpin 2006: The (Business-Driven) Enterprise Architect – http://blog.elementallinks.net/2006/01/it_linchpin_200.html.

Thanks for sharing this with me Brenda.

Cheers! Leo

There are a few key differences between strategy and architecture (especially enterprise-architecture), as I’ve written recently on my own blog – see http://weblog.tomgraves.org/index.php/2010/01/28/ea-and-strategy/ and http://weblog.tomgraves.org/index.php/2010/02/02/vision-strategy-plans-and-tactics/ – might be useful to be sure which of the two you’re aiming for here.

I know your skill-set list is only examples, but I would advocate including ‘synthesis’, as a necessary counterbalance to analysis/logic – otherwise you end almost automatically back in the specialist-only camp.

The only real worry I have is that I fear you’re being unrealistic in asking for deep _and_ broad. The problem is simply one of _time_. Keeping up to date in just one specialism is hard enough these days; but being expected to keep up to date in many different and often diametrically-opposed skills will be way too much to ask in real-world practice. More realistic might be that the practitioner has _had_ depth-experience in several different key fields, rather than is necessarily fully current in all of them. I would recommend an attitude of ‘current-_enough_’ – not necessarily current in depth, even in anything, but _does_ know enough to know what the current themes and trends are, and how to hold meaningful conversations with specialists who _are_ fully current in each field.

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