A good 9-minute podcast from Gartner on the role of enterprise architecture leaders, featuring Robert Handler, one of their research VPs. He spends some time discussing how an EA role is more than just IT:
“It’s become a truly leadership role, one that involves strong communication skills and fundamentally bilingual capabilities, being able to speak both business and IT.”
Handler mentions that the EA role often includes aspects of process optimization now. He also says that although EA’s have moved up from reporting a couple of levels below the CIO to reporting directly to the CIO, that they should really be reporting to the CEO — something that I’ve posted about previously. Lots of good stuff on who the enterprise architect should be forming strong relationships with, in order to help foster architectural alignment throughout the organization.
Update: there’s also an EA-related podcast from Macehiter Ward-Dutton, a UK-based consultancy. The first part is unrelated industry news analysis, but there’s some EA bits based on a discussion that Neil Macehiter had (offline) with James McGovern starting at the 23-minute mark. Apparently, they’ll be having McGovern on the podcast later this month.
Thanks for the link Sandy!
You might be interested to know that the James McGovern conversation came up because we’re currently interviewing a heap of EAs, CIOs and other important IT types for a book we’re writing on the challenges of IT-business alignment. Hopefully over time we’ll persuade a few other of our interviewees to join us on podcasts…
I’m looking forward to hearing more of the podcasts, and to reading the upcoming book.