the enterprise. “At the end of the day, enterprise architecture is about making strategic decisions to guide
the evolution of an organization’s IT capabilities and
assets, to help the organization operate faster, better
and cheaper over time,” says Hussein Din, enterprise
architect for Capgemini Financial Services.
WHO ARE THE ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTS?
Enterprise architecture hasn’t always been a business-
friendly process. Until recent, it was an exercise rarely
practiced or seen outside the glass walls of the data
center, says Smith. “Enterprise architecture is changing
from how we’ve seen it in the past,” she says. “It’s be-
coming a more holistic process, versus being focused on
technology and applications.”
There is now an emerging class of professionals—en-
terprise architects—who bridge the worlds of business
and IT, having expertise in and speaking the language of
both. Enterprise architects are guiding efforts to not only
add a business sense to traditional IT planning, but also
properly introduce their enterprises to new initiatives
such as cloud computing and Big Data management.
Professionals both inside and outside of IT should be
involved with guiding their organizations’ business tech-
nology growth. “They are those people who understand
things pretty quickly, and are pretty good at abstracting
things out,” says Frank Petersmark, CIO advocate with
consultancy X by 2. “They have to be curious people
who ask questions and should be good listeners. More
than anything, they’ve got to understand the business
they’re in.”
Enterprise architects—or those involved in EA teams—
also should understand intuitively that there’s money on
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may 2012 insurance networking news 21
