The 4 must-have qualities of an Enterprise Architect

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I have been part of Financial Services Technology for more than 20 years. Generally in our industry, EA (or Enterprise Architecture) is responsible for 3 distinct activities:

1. Review of greenfield application architecture and approvals (Review Board, Change Board, etc.,)
2. Approval of new services/vendor platforms to make sure they are fit-for-purpose for the company and validate that these platforms co-exist with the rest of the enterprise
3. Maintain a catalog of current IT landscape and approved services

These EA might organize themselves around multiple specialties, for example, Database or Data Architecture, Application Architecture, Specialized Vendor Platform Experts (Cloud, BPM, High Performance, Messaging, etc.,), Technology.

Some of the EAs are also familiar with the business they are in, the functionalities they support, bread and butter enterprise models within the industry they are in. Example: Asset Management, Supply Chain/Logistics, Market Data, Finance, etc.,

With this backdrop and quite a bit of ground they cover, I consistently hear the following from my colleagues, clients, and peers in the industry:

1. EA is just an audit function — They ask questions but do not have any answers