Enterprise Architects on the Development Team

Rebecca Parsons has written an article advocating that successful Enterprise Architects should consider joining the development teams they’re working with.

Enterprise Architecture groups often get separated from day to day development. This can lead to their knowledge of development work getting out of date and development teams not taking a broad company-wide perspective. Having seen this happen frequently Rebecca argues that enterprise architects can be much more effective by joining development teams.

I think her arguments are well formulated and I agree with them for the most part. There is a certain degree of accountability required from both development and architectural teams, accountability that has a tendency to get lost or shuffled if there is too many organizational layers in between. It has been my experience that an architect garners far more respect when he’s down in the trenches.

The complete article is available online.