The Peter Principle and Enterprise Architecture

It seems to me that many Enterprise Architects have been promoted from technical and design roles they were excellent at to knowledge management roles and business transformation roles that are poor at. The poor at these roles because they lack both the skills and  the inclination.

They make not even be aware of what Enterprise Architecture is really about - that is to say they may not realise:

• Enterprise Architecture is about the business - so an understanding of business products, services, capabilities, plans, goals, strategies etc. should be their initial focus (if you don't get those right the details don't matter)
• Enterprise Architecture is NOT about Architects - and can't be done by Enterprise Architects per se. 
• Enterprise Architecture is about managing and applying knowledge about the enterprise across the enterprise i.e. it is an ongoing process 
• most methods advocated for Enterprise Architecture haven't worked, don't work and won't work.
• Enterprise Architecture is not SW Engineering (or SW Architecture) - it is in essence not even design or architecture per se. The "A" word describes the knowledge NOT an activity.

So you turn a wonderful technician - whose main interest are in technology i.e. not business; design i.e. not planning; having knowledge not managing knowledge; in what they do i.e. not what other people do, (not in changing the behaviour of the organization) - will struggle.

They will struggle even more if they think

• Enterprise Architecture has worked well in the past, so they should keep doing that
• Their role is to design (i.e. to architect) not to establish a approaches and solutions which allow architectures to emerge, be recorded, be analysed by a disparate community

This combined with no concrete objective (i.e. business relevant bottom line influencing measures) means that they survive happily with their "emperor's new clothes" artefacts based on the lastest abstract framework, method, etc.

They will skill fully apply Dawkin's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty - by advocating new "frameworks" and terms e.g. "viewpoints" and referencing people to abstract academic discussions rather than just using simple terms, plane english, simple approaches and just get on with what is in fact quite a simple exercise - if approached with the right mind set and solutions.

• Peter Principles: see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

• Dawkins's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Theoretical physics is a genuinely difficult subject. Envious disciplines, which I shall not advertise, conceal their lack of content behind billowing clouds of deliberate obscurity.."