AG's blog

The unemployment news remains bleak as we suffer through the highest unemployment rate of the past 20 years.  Companies large and small are shedding jobs at an unprecedented rate, and many in corporate America are sitting on pins and needles as the next round of job cuts approaches.

But there are a few bright spots in the employment marketplace – and enterprise architects and IT strategists may fare better than most.  Using data from the job aggregation service indeed.com provides some interesting analysis of the marketplace.

Last week, Forrester Research released The Forrester Wave™: Business Process Analysis, EA Tools, And IT Planning, Q1 2009.  This was the second year that Forrester analyst Henry Peyret led the research, and this wave provides the broadest and most up to date coverage of EA and Strategic IT Planning tools currently available.

As part of the 2008 Architecture and Governance Survey earlier this year, we asked readers to list the top three items that they would like to have to make their jobs as strategists and architects better.  As we close out the tumultuous 2008 and look forward to the new year ahead, I've captured some of the most thought full sets of wishes for you to contemplate.

On behalf of the entre staff of A&G, I hope you have a peaceful holiday, and I look forward to providing insight for you in the new year.

- Jonas

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A view of the future

In the 1974 cult film Gone in 60 Seconds, H.B. Halicki plays Maindrian Pace, living a double life as both car thief and insurance investigator. While I can't say much about the 2000 remake starring Nicholas Cage, the original was a classic.

Sometimes, I feel that enterprise architects live a double life similar to Pace. Officially, we are the chief technology sheriff, and at other times we end up complicit in the perversion of the very standards and strategies that we are in charge of keeping.

The notion of outsourcing IT functionality is nothing new.  But moving a strategic capability such as enterprise architecture to an outsource provider sounds like a questionable proposition at best.  Never the less, a number of service providers are active in this market, selling services that range from EA organizational strategy, to one-time architectural development, to full on EA service outsourcing.

Enterprise Architecture teams often get stuck early in their process on framework selection.  I believe that if you spend more than a few hours selecting a framework, you have spent too much time on the matter!  To accelerate matters, Kevin L. Smith has authored the Pragmatic EA Framework.  Kevin introduces the framework in the following post - Jonas