Moving to Enterprise Architecture

As the consequence of a reorganization I have a lengthy new title at work:

Manager of Enterprise Architecture and Governance

I’m no longer a software development manager building up a team and delivering projects. In the near term I need to develop a charter, hire at least one new architect, and get started on some basic foundational work such as coming up with as-is and to-be models of our architecture.

I have some plans for how to be an effective enterprise architect team:

  • Concentrate on people. Mentoring, training, and guiding people will help you implement the right architecture.
  • Plan big, small steps every day. Incremental is the way to get there.
  • Governance disagreements should be rare.
  • The business needs to trust you. Confidence building takes gobs of time, but if you can’t keep convince your business customers, you can’t make the big changes.
  • Architects must code. No one gets to step back and just spend all their time in UML and Powerpoint. Everyone has to spend some time on real projects implementing their ideas and getting direct feedback on how well things work.

Nothing like defining a new role from scratch to get me out of bed in the morning.