ABSTRACT
If you are like most executives, your natural tendency might be to reward your best technologists with advancement, but Tennison suggests that when it comes to enterprise architecture, you go a dierent way. “In many organizations, the enterprise architect role is given to the lead technologist; the title is the prize that goes to the person who is deepest in a particular field. ‘He’s my best Java programmer, so I’ll make him my architect,’ ” Tennison says. “The problem with that approach is that your enterprise architect needs to get out of a single model and be able to move from one technology to another, to be able to transition as the stack needs to transition.” And so we arrive at yet another tenet of the Enterprise Architecture Paradox: You need to hire the right talent now to be prepared for a future you cannot see. “If you knew what 80 percent of your framework would look like down the road, you could pick the people smartest about that framework and have them build and enforce the standards,” Tennison says. “But what do you do when your marketing organization shows up and says, ‘Gosh, the web was great, but we’re ready for mobile’?” In that scenario, your Java programmer would be out of his element, and you would have to replace your enterprise architect.
