An Open Question, and Maybe a Research Topic
June 17th, 2009
There’s increasing interest in developing a university curriculum for educating enterprise architects, and it’s inevitable when talking with academics that questions about possible research topics come up.
Last year I gave a talk on “Open Questions about Enterprise Architecture and the Enterprise Architecture Profession” at The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Francisco (28 – 30 January 2008) and at the Enterprise Architecture and Integration Summit in Calgary Canada (11 – 12 May 2008). A year later, these questions remain unanswered, at least authoritatively. We need data, but all we have is opinions, so I’m hoping this item will provoke some suggestions as to how to get some real data, but I’ll settle for more discussion about what we think the answers might be, especially if it includes some justification.
Of the eleven questions I asked in those talks, I’m going to focus on one of them, and next time, some closely related questions.
The way I originally asked the question was
“Are enterprise architects born or made?”
This is a glib way of asking
“Is there an aptitude for enterprise architecture?”
The related questions are:
“If there is an aptitude for enterprise architecture, how do we recognize it?”
“What, if any, (possibly other) critical success factors are necessary to develop competent new enterprise architects?”
“Is it possible for someone to be a competent architect without any experience as a practitioner in the implementation medium of the architectures he/she develops?”
Two recent books have dealt with the general question of how aptitude relates to success. The central thesis of the more popular of the two, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” (Little, Brown), is that circumstance has more to do with success than ambition or aptitude. Regarding the extent to which aptitude contributes, Gladwell cites the “10000 hour rule”, the observation that the only thing clearly distinguishing the top performers in any discipline is that they have accumulated at least 10000 hours of “deliberate practice”, i.e., practice that is specifically targeted at addressing their performance deficiencies (”The Role of Deliberate Practice in The Acquisition of Expert Performance” by K. Anders Ericsson et al., Psychological Review, Vol. 100 No. 3, 1993). The other book, “Talent is Overrated”, by Geoff Colvin (Portfolio), adopts the 10000 hour rule as its central thesis, that talent or aptitude is an intuitive idea that is not supported by the evidence. Colvin does concede in his final chapter that aptitude or predisposition might provide a small but significant initial difference that is amplified into a big difference by the 10000 hours of deliberate practice, but he relies a lot on the failure of early performance to predict ultimate success (citing, for example, “child prodigies”) to make his case.
Reading these books, I wondered what role innate ability, aptitude or predisposition might play in determining the maximum level of performance one might achieve; neither Gladwell nor Colvin address this question, and it remains an open question as to what motivates an individual to make the often Herculean effort necessary to acquire 10000 hours of deliberate practice.
It is certainly the intuition among most practicing enterprise architects that I have talked to that there is a certain mindset that seems to characterize the best architects, and there does seem to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that IT and enterprise architects tend to be in the INTJ and INFP Myers-Briggs categories.
Be that as it may, how might aspiring enterprise architects acquire the requisite 10000 hours of deliberate practice, given that this is practice in the etude sense, targeted at the practitioner’s deficiencies, not practice in the professional sense, driven by the client’s needs.
So, what do you think? Is there an architectural aptitude? How might academic researchers confirm or deny such a hypothesis? Is there something different about architecture that renders the 10000 hour rule inapplicable or irrelevant?
len.
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My personal opinion is that the best IT architects have a solid foundation of the basics and that have an extensive history within IT performing not one but several or many roles (e.g. programming, business analysis, project management etc). The worst IT architects are often those that have just come out of university believing that they have the right (and the ability for that matter) to be brilliant - which is more often not the case. A similar comparison can be applied with Sandhurst (the British Army Officer Training College). The new officers emerging from “training” are not seen as experienced or good officers until a time that they have acquired the relevant knowledge. That is not saying that they are not potentially good material but that the basics have not been performed and therefore the higher levels of theory and knowledge cannot be applied without a foundation level. Similar to building architecture. You can spend all day designing the worlds most beautiful building but if you do not have the “time - the foundation level of knowledge and experience of application” the chances are it will have subtle but potentially disastrous design flaws that would deem the building beautiful but useless.
Based on my personal experience teaching undergraduates, there are definitely some people who have the right mind-set and grasp the concepts of EA virtually instantly. Typically, undergraduates have no industry experience and no prior exposure to the concept of architecture.
For most of them (typically 95%, although my sample size is still less than 100) the subject is an uphil struggle. After 30 hours of teaching and another 30 hours of coursework, pieces are beginning to fall into place, but they are not able to apply that knowledge. This does not mean that they cannot become architects with experience and a lot more work.
However, I have had around 5 students, who simply “got it”. I ask them to apply architecture thinking to a case study (the same case study I use for commercial training), and the results are outstanding. They are able to demonstrate the “joined up big-picture thinking” that characterises truly great EAs.
Conversely, in industrila training, I have encountered people who have served their time as “architects” and simply cannot break out of a very narrow focus and will NEVER become succesful enterprise architects.
Research shows that to become an olympic standard swimmer, you need to put in 20,000 hours or work in a pool. I could have put in 10 times that, I have neither the physical characteristics, nor the co-ordination to achieve that standard. Why would EA be different?
I feel that there are several aptitudes that may contribute (pre-requisites to efficient verbal and non-verbal discourse analysis and chunking):
1. Language abilities (advance understanding and feel, composition aptitude) and philosophy aptitude
2. Motor abilities - gross and fine
3. Understanding of the way people think and feel
(empathy), psychology aptitute
4. Mathematics or music
Training in any of these may cotribute to the “EA practice hours” that you have mentioned
I think you are presenting a false choice, as though the two options are exclusive. To me, this is a nature vs. nurture debate, and I will structure my reply based on how I have resolved that very debate within my own mind. I believe that the answer, ultimately, is both.
If you accept that nature determines the levels of innate abilities and that nurture determines how well these abilities are developed and matured over time (or not), then you can more easily explain the disparate results that are observed. First, let’s analyze what kinds of abilities we are talking about. What aptitude(s) are necessary or even helpful for an IT or enterprise architect?
Fundamentally, I believe that at least two innate abilities (not skills) are essential. One of these is the ability to quickly grasp new concepts. Without this ability, it is far more difficult for someone to become proficient in the many different disciplines that it takes to develop the requisite skill set. If it is more difficult for someone to grasp new concepts, they are more likely to become frustrated or settle into a single discipline as a comfort zone. The second is the ability to apply concepts that have been learned to other areas in order to look at problems from multiple perspectives. This is a form of mental agility that I believe is essential in order to develop the multi-discipline analytical and thought processes that are necessary to mature an architecture skill set. I don’t believe these abilities can be taught or learned, I believe these are fundamental attributes for how someone thinks and learns. Everyone is different and possesses different levels of each of these two abilities, and their own potential is enabled or hampered by their own natural abilities.
However, anyone who possesses any measure of these abilities must be nurtured and developed into possessing the knowledge and skills with which to apply them as an architect. I believe the key factor here is culture – in what kind of business culture does this development occur? Are these multiple disciplines made available or are they discouraged? What opportunities are pursued and in what fields during the many years of skills development? Are there mentors available? Is the business culture amenable or aware of the long-term benefits of planning or are they so focused on ‘getting it done’ that any architecture discipline is ignored? In order for anyone with abilities to grow, they must be afforded an environment that encourages this growth.
It is quite possible for people with varying levels of abilities to develop into skilled architects, but the levels of difficulty and ultimate success depend greatly on both nature and nurture.
Jeff writes:
“I think you are presenting a false choice, as though the two options are exclusive.”
I’m not sure why you concluded that, because it is certainly not what I believe. I in fact do believe that it is usually a combination of both predisposition or aptitude and investment in self development that determines competence or success. I happen to disagree rather strongly with both Gladwell and Colvin. I haven’t yet read the original paper about the “10000 hour rule”, but I have a suspicion that the way they measured “aptitude” may have been faulty.
len.
Len,
I was responding to the first (admittedly glib) question posed in this topic, which was:
“Are enterprise architects born or made?”
My initial response was also somewhat glib…
However, to answer the clarified question:
“Is there an aptitude for enterprise architecture?”
my answer does concur with the other respondants: Yes, there is an aptitude, but it is difficult to describe or measure.
The rest of my post dealt with the ability and opportunity to develop that aptitude, as an aptitude by itself does not make an Enterprise Architect.
Mike also include the ability to grasp the ‘big picture’ as a component of this aptitude, and I concur.
My apologies for the false choice comment…..
Jeff
A couple years ago I was at a conference eating lunch with friends - all of us were architects, all from different companies, in 3 different counties. We were all ENTJ or INTJ. That said temperments do change over time. At work most of the architects I work with many are xNTJ, but a few are xNFP.
Hi, great debate! Here, in the UK Universities, have a national programme (BSc Information Technology Management for Business) which 13 Unis are developing and in my case EA is a part of our final year (25%, notional 300 hours study). I concur with the main thoughts here and I do have our students Myers Briggs so I may look at correlating it! Interestingly we now have two years experience of a our EA course and the employment prospects of our grads!. Here I agree with Ian, they cannot expect to break in at the top but that is not our plan neither in this case or any other. We take a pracademic approach, top down, we have access to practicing EA specialists (IBM, Ingenia and others) but we see it from a project management rather than an out & out technical standpoint. For us, and hence I guess our students, EA is about organizing systems and approaches, understanding and deploying standards and standard approaches. Crucially they need to understand the objectives and practices of EA so they can work upwards from their career entry point with understanding of the commercial imperatives and value of EA. Also we see EA as THE fast changing top of the food chain topic in the IT world today which adds to our challenge in keeping ahead of the decomposition of EA as it becomes more establishment and less bleeding edge.
I’ll go out on a limb a bit and guess that many practicing EAs don’t have 10,000 hours of experience directly in the field. What you’d expect in that case is that those with marginally better aptitudes for EA will realize outsized benefits from those marginally better aptitudes. Over time, as more EAs come online and gain more experience, that experience will begin to count more than aptitude. To the question of aptitude, in my experience the ideal EA skillset includes both technical aptitude and business aptitude (e.g., a background in management consulting). Possession of both skills is somewhat rare, or appears that way to me at any rate. Lots of technical people without a strong business sense, and lots of good management consultants who don’t get their hands dirty enough with the technical work. People skills are also very important and are of course where many EA projects fail.
At the risk of not addressing your questions, I’d approach the issue in a different way, by asking what makes a good enterprise architect great? Experience is a big part of it (although I’m not sure about the “10000 hour rule”), but there’s more.
Personally, the difference between a good architects vs. a great architect is his or hers capacity to have a holistic knowledge of the solution and a working knowledge of all the disciplines that will make the solution a reality.
You might be a good architect if you know the principles of SOA better than anyone in the room, but you’ll be a great architect, if you know better than the business analyst next to you the critical business success factors for the project. A great enterprise architect has a greater breadth of knowledge than most people in the room.