I once heard an enterprise IT architect describe their job in a rather grim way. They said their job was to design beautiful systems architectures which everyone then completely ignored. Such is the life of an enterprise architect: all the experience and planning in the world can never fully survive first contact with the enemy, or in this case, the needs of the business.
It can be a thankless job, requiring practitioners to simultaneously assess the present, predict the future and assuage the pains of the past, all while building the social capital needed to enact enterprise-wide change.
But all is not lost for those out there who are tasked with making order out of the chaos of business systems. There are plenty of tools and best practices and open source projects and other stuff to help them do their jobs, every day. So much stuff, in fact, that we've whipped up a brand new blog specifically covering topics that enterprise architects would find appealing.
That's a wide swath of topics, covering everything from automating IT infrastructure to the meat-space skills associated with spreading the gospel of your prophetic systems diagrams. Stop by and take a gander at the great stuff they're writing about.
Heck, if all this sounds appealing to you as a next step in your career, there's even an article over there to help you do just that!
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