Dana Gardner recently reported on an interesting Open Group panel in his post, SOA places broad demands on IT leadership beyond traditional enterprise architect role. At the 19th Annual Open Group Enterprise Architect’s Practitioners Conference in Chicago, Dana moderated a panel on the role and impact of skills and experience for EAs in both the public sector and the private sector. Joe McKendrick was one of the members and he also wrote about it, At Open Group: business and government face similar SOA growth pains.
The panel members conveyed that the complexity and interdependencies of SOA are pushing IT leadership more toward a business strategy role. As one panelist said, “The enterprise architect is really more focused on trying to bring the organization together around a business strategy or mission. And, certainly, they understand the tooling and how to translate the mission, vision, and strategy into an SOA architecture.” And “what we are really looking for are people who can then move into the business space, who have a lot more of the softer skills, things like influencing.” You can find the complete transcript of the session through Dana’s post.
Technical skills remain a necessary but no longer sufficient requirement for IT leaders in the new SOA space. I certainly agree with the premise here. To support this requirement, we are constantly striving to make the enabling technologies of SOA more transparent, so that architecture is more of a business process and Policy activity than a programming one. For instance, enabling the "auto-discovery" of a service and its downstream dependencies, and providing that as a view without all of the technical poking and prodding usually needed to get a diagnosis.
As you go through testing and validation of all the interconnected pieces of SOA, it is important to keep the business side and impacts in mind. As one of the panelists said, “we are software architects, but we are really trying to solve the business problem.” It is nice to see a group of IT industry leaders taking this position.
Comments