The executive management team is "accountable" for ensuring the development and maintenance of a 1-3-5 year EA "strategic" roadmap with accountabilities to ensure mechanisms are in place to steward "tactical" instantiations of the strategic roadmap via an eGovernance mechanism. Visibility of the eGovernance capability is a critical driver into informing corporate governance as managed by the board of directors and executive management team (CEO, CIO, CTO, CEA, COO, CFO).
It would be myopically self-limiting to assume cEA's must have a business degree. Rather, they must possess the business acumen and experience to know the right questions to elicit insightful responses from business subject matter experts. The most successful EA's, probably more than most other high technology and business tracks, do not equip they're toolbox and build their war chest from classroom training in pursuit of a sheep skin. Our experience indicates it would be foolhardy and naive to expect "...GEAO should only certify Enterprise Architects who have a business degree."

What remains critical to the success of the Enterprise Architecture as an industry capability and corporate competency, are business-technology convergence experts who are business aware and technology savvy, not Harvard MBA's and not silo heads. The EA must have significant real world experience both in technology and business roles, be a current or past cPMP and be PMI certifiable, having worked with cross-functional teams from the "board room to the "clean room" (QA/QC/Test/Transition)" in advisory and individual contributor capacities in addition to having held C-level, PMO, and lead architect roles during their career, with some level of demonstrable subject matter expert knowledge in each of the domain views within the enterprise architecture model. (form email www.MarkITS.us/contacts.html)

You forget that EA's are CEO/CFO/CIO advisors that lead to further investment in ICT capabilities, which I argue is a complex area of speciality that people with pure business degree's are completely disconnected from - especially with a growing, collaborative and highly connected "web 2.0" savvy internal IT community.

The EA's need to drive leadership with technical people, holes in engagement and credibility make this role ineffective. A GEAO certification based on "business degree only" is laughable; there is no doubt a need to tease out [and grow] business skills as a one of the fundamental pillars to effective enterprise architecture - discussing what these metrics are and how they are measured is a worthy discussion for the blog.

The value of EA is to enable agile , simple and cost efficient business process and technology solution rather than a central planned "architecting the enterprise" effort. As much as the arrogant enterprise architect want to enjoy the status as a visionary and strategist to put EA in the direction of "architecting the enterprise", EA must provide a value and become a culture to avoid the fade of "come and go". The most important character of an Enterprise Architect is humble to learn the experience of the others.

For more information please read

the value of EA

Unfortunately many still view the role of the enterprise architect from a "technological perspective".

As an individual who holds an undergraduate degree in computing technology and two graduate degrees - one in architecture (Dipl. Arch.) and a second in management (MBA) I believe I have a unique insight into the world of the enterprise architect.

Based on my educational background and three decades of design experience I would strongly suggest that a "business degree" is the only educational foundation upon which an enterprise architect can truly build a successful career.

Important to this discussion is that "architecture", as a formal discipline, is humanistic in nature. While one does learn about technological aspects in the study and application of "architecture" these are not the primary aspects of the architectural profession. Rather, the liberal arts in the form of sociology, stratgey, law, management and finance are the primary foundational elements that induce the "characteristics" of the architect.

The same fundamentals hold true for the "enterprise architect". As a Director of Enterprise Architecture who leads and mentors professional enterprise architects, I have never looked to these individuals as "technologists". While most have gained a deep understanding of varying information technologies, this "knolwedge" was (and still is) simply a by-product of the research that all enterprise architects must do.

However, this gained "knowledge" should be used to compliment the decision making of the enterprise architect; decision making that must be focused on stratgy development, design governance, economic feasibility of information systems, organizational behavior (i.e. change managment)and solutions design.

Further, an "architect" must also be a designer. The ability to be creative should not be stifled by technologically imposed boundaries. While there is a "tone of creativity" in software development and infrastructure deployment there are implied boundaries associated with the underlying science and technology associated with such efforts.

True "creativity" begins with no boundaries. The process of design is to seek out "acceptable boundaries" based on determining such things as levels of risk, money, time, skills, and regulatory compliance to name a few.

More importantly technological decisions must remain a considerable distance from the strategic decisions of a business if an organization is going to properly assess its options for achieving growth, sustainability and competitiveness. While important, technological decisions must be brought into the "design discussion" as a means for fine tuning organizational actions and not as an imposing mechanism that drives forward a "technological will" (e.g. deploying an ERP system because it can integrate data from disparate information systems)upond the organization.

Those who have been formally trained in the "art of business" have the tools and capacity to avoid these kinds of errors in judgement.

Although most Enterprise Architects grow up in the IT world, I agree that to be effective an Enterprise Architect must be equaly proficient in business, technology and political landscape of the organization. Given this, I think it makes sense to keep business degree as a pre-requisite. At the same time it's important to realize that business degree in itself is what makes an Enterprise Architect.

- Tony