Do you need to be heavily technical to be an enterprise architect?

N2IT

I was wondering what others thought about this?

I've seen a lot of people on Linkedin with this title and even at the place I work at now. A lot of them have business or advanced math degrees, but I find it bizarre that a lot of them don't have IT degreed or even CS. This isn't one or two people either this is a boolean search on Linkedin and other professional media sites.

I would say Math was 1 Engineering was 2 and some Business degree was 3. CS did come in sometimes but not as much as I would expect.

Does this make sense? I would think a CS major would be the number 1 candidate for a enterprise architect but I suppose my theory could be wrong.

ptilsen

I would say yes to the thread title. Degrees don't matter as much. Don't get me wrong, I think CS makes the most sense (as you know), but it's not a requirement to being heavily technical. Certainly, having a strong business acumen along with heavy technical knowledge is the best bet for this type of position, so business degrees coupled with technical expertise are what I would expect.

Our Enterprise Architect (my boss) has a CS degree, but he could just as easily have the same technical knowledge and a business degree.

N2IT

PT

I agree with you, I just found it bizarre that out of 30+ searches (which isn't a ton) that Math was number 1. It was probably 35-40%.

O well thanks for chiming in I appreciate your contribution. It always makes a lot of sense.

GAngel

Well they do the planning for big projects and make sure everyone is on the same page briniging large groups of independant sources together. They don't need to be able to deploy exchange to 20k users. They just need to know which tech to use where to source it and can do it in the budget required.

networker050184

Depends on the actual job role. Architect, engineer, admin all mean different things at different places. I've known people titled architect that do no sort of technical design whatsoever and purely a business function and also people titled engineer that work on the help desk. Unfortunately there is no standard duty to title mapping in the industry so there really isn't much you can glean from that.

SteveLord

Ours are extremely technical and are of the highest IT classification/paygrade in state government ($130-$150k). We have about 8 of them (out of several hundred IT people employed) between server/vmware, server/exchange, linux, networking, databases and application development specialties. I've worked with most of them from time to time and I am amazed at how they are able to balance their craft, tons of meetings, tons of projects, rotate for on call and still take phonecalls during the day. Historically I have found that if they don't know it, it can't be done.

nel

i would like to add one more thing. Yes, the EA is a pivitol role. It brings many different teams and technologies together to create the overall picture. However, from my experience (again its my experience) i have found an EA needs to know a wide knowledge of information but it does not necessarily need to be deep. All the EA guys i know tend to recommend TOGAF and its methods if you are interested in that space. Also EAs are very well paid and situated in a senior position on a wedge of $$$

ptilsen

Well, the key word is heavy, not deep. I don't think it needs to be deep. In fact, I think it's impossible to have truly deep and truly wide technical knowledge. The EA should have very, very wide, slightly deep knowledge.