The Case for Enterprise Architects

When technology infrastructure lines up with business projects like musicians in a marching band, you know you have a good enterprise architect on staff. But will you keep him when it's time to start handing out pink slips?

You will if you can make the case for this hard-to-define but critical IT position. An enterprise architect, or team of them, creates a model-usually with graphical software, but paper will do-of how your company works. That includes the business processes and the related technology as well as a common vocabulary for IT and non-IT people to use to discuss operations. The goal is a little thing called alignment.

The essence of the job "is about improving communication between the people with the problems and those who would solve them," says Leon Kappelman, cochair of the Society for Information Management's enterprise architect working group. "That's vital."

Believers such as Scottrade CIO Ian Patterson use the enterprise architect (EA) position in part to bring the IT group close to the internal customer. At the $1 billion brokerage, CEO Rodger Riney recently suggested to Patterson to send some EAs to User Summits with customers-people who trade stock online-to learn directly what services they want, Patterson says. "They get firsthand knowledge of what customers are saying" to translate into IT projects, he explains.

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