Jack-of-all-trades torn apart: Skills and competences of an enterprise architect

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) is used to improve business-IT alignment. In order to achieve this, the organizations need skilled and competent work-force, namely enterprise architects. However, EA is a management approach without a commonly agreed definition or scope. This makes the education and recruitment of enterprise architects ambiguous and elusive. Even though the enterprise architects often operate in IT department, their job description can significantly differ from other IS professionals. Therefore, EA roles or skills and competences cannot be extrapolated solely from IT/IS discipline or literature, but more domain specific understanding is needed. Yet this is not studied comprehensively. Some frameworks exist where enterprise architects are described as jack-of-all-trades but they provide very little understanding about what type of skills should be emphasized and in what type of EA work. In this Delphi study, we elucidate these shortages by identifying different approaches of EA work and by providing a list of most important skills for an enterprise architect. The skill list shows that the enterprise architect position themselves in the intersection of social and technical communities. This indicates that although different EA domains emphasise different skills, the main defining factor of EA skills is the capability to operate in a sociotechnical playground.