A lot of the time the enterprise architect is a project manager with technical insights, ability to talk to both the business and the development side, and, mos

A lot of the time the enterprise architect is a project manager with technical insights, ability to talk to both the business and the development side, and, most importantly someone who has a real impact on decision making. We use them quite a lot, to reasonable success in the Danish public sector. The real trouble starts when you get too many MBA types and no technical experts on your “architect team”, but they tend to work their way into decision making in any form in enterprise anyway, so it’s not like you can really avoid them even if you don’t use EAs. I get the article though, architect can be so many things in IT. It can be the techie who took an MBA and now uses it to get top management on board with what IT needs to the guy who set up and maintains your office365/ADFS/Azure administration, to someone who is telling you how to build software. And enterprise architect is often the most meaningless title of all. Doesn’t mean they’re all useless, because they really aren’t, but it does mean you never know what you get until you’ve seen what they can do.