There's an odour in enterprise IT, perhaps multiple. A faint worrying sound of last gasps of Enterprise Architecture. Well, no. Of course, this isn't the case. But let me try to explain why we might at least consider it. Let me first suggest what I mean by EA. Very obliquely it is the practices, skills, organisational structures, ideas, that are embraced in frameworks like TOGAF, practiced by a significant number of people in this industry, sold by consulting organisations, and set as one of the primary mechanism by which organisations connect IT with the business. In fact, it is probably fair to suggest that as EA has embedded itself over the last 15 years (25 years?), TOGAF has become the badge of choice. This is not to say I'm just getting at TOGAF; rather that TOGAF exemplifies the current state of the "art" of EA, and that it serves as context.
"Of course, if we take stupidity as our base assumption, and instigate controlling processes drive a certain banal adherence to a way of understanding position, skills, pay, then the process might create this helplessness, not the other way around."
This is precisely what we've been doing, with the expected result.
" It has been a fact of the paid IT professional's work life that they will be paid more to work at increasing levels of abstraction than to become better and better at what they are good at."
You nailed it right there. And this hasn't changed.
Doing Enterprise Architecture by Stopping!
"Of course, if we take stupidity as our base assumption, and instigate controlling processes drive a certain banal adherence to a way of understanding position, skills, pay, then the process might create this helplessness, not the other way around."
This is precisely what we've been doing, with the expected result.
" It has been a fact of the paid IT professional's work life that they will be paid more to work at increasing levels of abstraction than to become better and better at what they are good at."
You nailed it right there. And this hasn't changed.