I am an Enterprise Architect. I
help companies migrate data centers. That can mean moving from one city to
another, or it can mean upgrading their existing data center to newer hardware,
different or more current versions of applications and middleware; or it can
mean moving from in-house platforms to the cloud. The title Enterprise
Architect (EA) can be daunting; the concept is relatively new to our
discipline. There isn’t much written describing how it fits conceptually into the
various roles that comprise normal IT operations. Over dinner, I described what
my job is to a friend by using this analogy:
Suppose you wanted to move from
one house to another. Typically you would pack everything up, rent a truck or
schedule a moving van, load it up, drive to the new house, unpack everything,
get settled in, and maybe go back to the old place and clean it out. The Moving
Architect would figure out the number of different types of boxes to buy, for
books, for clothing and bedding, for the china, for any art. The "bill of
materials" would list the furniture, the number and sizes of the boxes, and any
other items needing special handling. The Moving Architect would suggest how
big a truck to rent, how many movers to hire, how long the move would take, and
how much it would cost.
Moving a data center is more
complicated. Most organizations cannot tolerate an extended outage, so
the challenge is more like moving from one house to another without disrupting
the daily routines of the people living in the house, and the people who help out at either house like the landscapers, the
realtors who want to show the old house, and the trash collectors whose
vehicles can not be blocked.
The Enterprise Architect has to
consider the family’s daily activities. When does the bus pick up the kids? On
moving day, will the kids know to get on to the new bus to take them home to
the new house? The EA needs to know which days are school days and which
aren’t, and which days the kids might have after-school activities and how long
they might take. To move non-disruptively, the EA will stock the fridge and the
cupboard in advance, but some foods spoil over time, so that preparation step
has to be timed to not waste resources.
Since moving furniture cannot
happen instantaneously, the EA will have to fit out the new house with
furniture, bedding, towels, and some clothing in advance. The EA has to make
sure the utilities are on and the home is ready to occupy. And in preparation
for the move, the EA has to lead the family in a dry run for the move, without
interrupting their normal daily activities. The EA will provide documentation
on how to use the new home features.
The Enterprise Architect has to
understand the patterns of use of the IT resources across time, to create a
safe, secure, recoverable plan to migrate work non-disruptively from one set of
IT infrastructure to another. So the EA will ask questions of the workers that
seem as trivial and pointless as asking the kids what they want for breakfast:
if the answer is oatmeal, then the shopping list needs to be updated, the
utilities have to be up and in place, the cookware that was used on the old gas
range may have to be replaced to avoid damaging the new electric radiant heat
ceramic stovetop, and the recipe may need to be updated to accommodate that new
stove’s different heating and cooking times. Knowing how the IT resource is
used in detail helps the EA guide the migration.
This analogy is structured
specifically to evoke parallels to the Zachman Framework. What does an
Enterprise Architect do? The EA generates an optimal isomorphic mapping of one instantiated
Zachman Framework into another.