Can enterprise architects stay in the game?

On March 11, InfoWorld will hold its second virtual conference on EA (enterprise architecture). It’s an interesting time to delve into EA. Like everyone else, architects are being asked to slash their budgets. In a dire economic environment where cuts threaten not only new initiatives, but the ability to deliver baseline functionality, how much organizational energy is left for EA?

After all, EA is still seen as pretty esoteric. It’s all about developing a top-down view of business processes, envisioning a desired end state, and procuring or reallocating technology resources to make things work better across the organization. Under the best of circumstances, this has always been a difficult mission, mainly because it challenges line-of-business interests and entrenched IT procedures. With all aspects of IT under greater stress and with fewer resources, the job of the enterprise architect can only get tougher in the downturn.

[ Special report: IT and the financial crisis ]

Yet I would argue that the job of enterprise architect has never been more essential. No business can weather the economic storm without adapting its business processes and technology infrastructure. Without architectural vision and direction, the outcome of that adaptation becomes more a matter of chance than of design. So how can enterprise architects maintain their influence and help guide their organizations through challenging times?

Well, first and foremost, they can use their partners on the business side to help re-prioritize initiatives. Right now it’s all about retrenchment and focusing on objectives that yield the most business benefit at the lowest levels of effort. That doesn’t mean giving up on long-term objectives or indulging in projects with quick ROI and no sustainability, but now is the time to compromise and focus on short-term goals.

That being said, agility should climb even higher on the list of priorities. In the early days of EA, one of the chief causes of failure was that the end state — while an improvement — was just as inflexible as where the organization started. The ability to spin up new lines of business and quickly deprovision others will be crucial to business survival in the coming years. In particular, service-oriented architecture has made a persuasive case for the business benefits of agility built on shared services, while virtualization is providing the means to apply IT horsepower where and when it’s needed.

One aspect of that agility may be new, lighter-weight technologies to replace expensive, labor-intensive ones. For example, in building a service-oriented architecture, deploying a bunch of service appliances at the network layer may be a better solution than rolling out an enterprise service bus. In other cases, maybe a simple mash-up at the presentation layer can provide nearly as much functionality as a full application development project. This is the age of “good enough” solutions.

Also, consider outside-the-firewall resources. Cloud computing options now provide IT with interesting new options: Amazon, for example, makes it ridiculously easy and cheap to lease compute and storage capabilities for new projects. Internet-based development platforms like Microsoft’s new Azure platform, Google’s App Engine, and Salesforce’s Force.com provide all the tools necessary to develop and launch Web applications that can be consumed by internal users or your customers. And of course, software-as-a-service applications, from salesforce automation to ERP systems, let IT expand capabilities without up-front licensing or hardware costs.

These are exciting new options, but they are just technology tools, not strategy. The burning question in EA today is whether architects will lead in times of accelerated change or end up marginalized as business leaders define core capabilities with or without the input of IT.

Once, enterprise architects were thought of as ivory tower types whose grand schemes had little tangible effect. Today, leadership and communications abilities, along with an intuitive understanding of business, are the key qualities management looks for in architects who can really get things done. To stay relevant, architects must anticipate change and present new ideas that can help the business navigate choppy waters. And if those ideas are accepted, management must reaffirm the authority of architects to effect change across the organization.

With that authority — and with governance best practices that provide a feedback loop with developers and administrators on the ground — EA can continue on its trajectory of being more, not less, crucial to business strategy.