SOA Enterprise Architects Views

SOA Enterprise Architects Views

To hire the right people is the key to successful SOA projects. You dont just need technical experts but to hire the right enterprise architects besides skills you ask so much more from these people in the context of politics, in the context of collaboration, in the context of migration and transformation.

HR have actually no clue where to look at besides comparing tickboxes on CVs as most HR people arent deeply enough in the business to look for the right attributes and indications to hire the right architects for greater solutions.

Enterprise Architects need a background in EA methodologies and knowledge in governance aspects that plain SOA practioners not automatically need to know and need to be aware of or are not envolved with.

So SOA and Enterprise Architecture are not equivalents.

No question that architects for both areas need a profound technical background around platforms and technologies but besides that there is the question who are the people
that have the softer skills, that can move into the business space, that are able to build trust and relationships with CEOs and CFOs as well as the CTO.

So you are looking for broad experienced people who have methodology knowledge in design and enterprise architecture. In terms of hiring the right experts people should be quite articulate written and verbally and should have broad technical background with hardware software and networks and added to all they have to understand business process choreography how to model manage organise and arrange all these services mapped to the technical layer.

Also architects should know more than one platform ( like Windows, Linux, Unix, Host-OSes, Closed and Open Source ) otherwise they are just specialists but not architects.

When talking about business transformation which is a high level activity the major goal of SOA is a substantially major transformation of the business towards more agility and
flexibility. Here when directly addressing IT departments with this the question comes up: Isnt this asked a little bit much, do IT Managers really have the overview the training and the support to actually transform the organisation.

SOA is more a community effort where CEO, targeted departments and IT should do that transformation as multiple owners of the business process changed by this newly created Governance Group.

Having High-Level Business Processes and breaking them down to Business Services using components of the technical infrastructure SOA needs a technical leadership visionary.
Not falling back into the thinking of point-to-point integration is so important and has to be monitored by these responsible managing individuals.

So the demands on the leadership skills are really high.