How to Hire an Enterprise Architect

Hiring an Enterprise Architect is hard. Enterprise Architects have to work on a digital landscape that's filled with a broad array of continuously evolving technologies. Unlike industrial architects, there is no single certification that signals they are up for the diverse work of combining technical expertise with business needs. Finding candidates who can walk the talk necessary to be effective in such a technical environment is challenging. Once identified, making sure that such talent has a personality that is a cultural fit for the organization only adds to the hiring process's difficulty.

Typically, the type of projects that require the expertise and experience of an Enterprise Architect have budgets that run in the millions of dollars. Because of that level of investment, the wrong person can cost quite a lot. It can put an entire company—even a government—at risk. If you have any doubt, remember the impact that the initial, failed rollout out of HealthCare.gov had on the Affordable Care Act. The project recovered, but still, the scars run deep.

So the question is, how does a company hire an Enterprise Architect? The short answer is, with great care. But, putting such jesting aside about a very serious topic, the sections that follow describe a general approach a company can use in its hiring process. The details will differ according to the size and organization of the company. The high-level approach provides the concepts and guidelines for creating a strategy that fits the needs of a project of any size.

Hiring to the position vs. hiring the athlete

There's a saying in the baseball world that describes how scouts approach hiring talent: You can hire to the position, or you can hire the athlete. Hiring to the position means that you are looking for a person with all it takes to be a great pitcher or a center fielder. Roger Clemens is an example of a position hire. Pitcher is the only position he ever played in his major league career. He was hired to be a pitcher, and that's what he did.

Hiring the athlete is, as the term implies, when you hire a person because he or she has the physical makeup to play a variety of positions. An example of such an athlete is Pete Rose. He appeared in 17 All-Star games and played five positions—second baseman, left fielder, right fielder, third baseman, and first baseman—over the course of those appearances.

When it comes to identifying the right Enterprise Architect to hire, the notion of hiring to the position vs. hiring the athlete has useful relevance. It all depends on the project at hand and the company implementing the project. If the company is large and the project is long term with a very specific focus, in a very specific industry that's governed to very specific conventions and regulations, then hiring to the position might be best. What if your company is a small to medium business (SMB) and the project is short-term and more general in nature, for example implementing an equipment rental application intending to serve a variety of industries? In that case, hiring the athlete might be a better choice.

As you can see, there are two critical factors to consider: The type of company and the kind of project. Hence, the importance of a well-defined job description. Some projects need the specialist type of Enterprise Architect while others will do best with a jack-of-all-trades. However, without the clarity of a well-defined job description, the determination will be based more on guessing and intuition than justifiable facts.

Once the job is well-defined, and the type of Enterprise Architect has been identified, the next step is to write the job description.

Know what you're looking for

No two enterprise applications are alike. They may share a common foundation, such as the case of an SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. Even then, the application workflows that need support, the security rules that need to be followed, and the components that will be integrated vary from project to project. Thus, just bringing in any old SAP Architect is a risk. At the least, the Architect should be familiar with the industry in which the ERP is being implemented, if not the particular technologies common to the business domain. For example, if you're hiring an Architect to work on a telecom project, that candidate should have intimate knowledge with global telephone switching systems.

The way to address the risk is to create a very detailed description of the project to which the Architect will be assigned as well as the skillset the position requires.

Take a look at the job description in Listing 1 below. I pulled it from the Internet. It's a real live job posting.

ROLE: The Enterprise Architect is responsible for the creation, communication and improvement of the key principles, methods and models that describe the enterprise's current state and future state to enable its evolution. Through proven experience in a technical domain area, the person in this role provides architecture guidance across business and technology on a complex technical project.

REQUIRED & PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Minimum 5+ years of solutions and software development architecture experience building reliable and scalable solutions required

• Proven technical experience in a domain area such as databases, application dev, ERP, infrastructure, cloud, QA, systems analysis, etc.

• Participated in a full life cycle complex, enterprise wide system implementation requiring knowledge of business domain requirements, application components, data models, integrations, information security and infrastructure components

• Prior applications/software development (programming) experience

• Solid presentation skills, ability to effectively influence

Listing 1: A less than informative job description for an Enterprise Architect.

First, the job description provides no clue about the employer's industry. Is it aerospace? Finance? Entertainment? Dunno, but it matters. Imagine putting out a job description for a doctor without mentioning the discipline. The only thing that pediatricians and podiatrists have in common is that both specialties begin with the letter "p" and that both require at least four years of medical school.

And then, there's the way qualifications are described:

Proven technical experience in a domain area such as databases, application dev, ERP, infrastructure, cloud, QA, systems analysis, etc.

"Technical expertise in a domain area such as databases…" Which databases? DB2, SQL Server, MySql, MongoDB, Redis? There are a lot of databases out there, and each has its own peculiarities. Asking for expertise in "databases" is acceptable when you're hiring a Data Architect. They're expected to have broad knowledge in a multitude of databases. But, when hiring an Enterprise Architect, describing the particular database technologies a company users matters. Do you really want to hire an Enterprise Architect with only Oracle DB experience when your company runs Cassandra on Kubernetes?

The job listing also asks for expertise in application developer, ERP, infrastructure, etc. Either the employer is looking for a superhero who goes by the name Enterprise Architect or is fishing for as many resumes as it can get and then filtering out the qualified candidates in the resume review process. Or, there's a third possibility: That the project is as nebulous as the job description itself. In any event, there's a good argument to be made that the vagueness of the job description is a warning sign of things to come.

Now, look a look at the job description in Listing 2, below:

ROLE: The Enterprise Architect will lead a team that consists of 20 developers, 3 DBAs, 2 security expert, and 4 business analysts. The Enterprise Architect is responsible for the creation, communication and improvement of the key principles, methods and models that describe the enterprise's current state and future state to enable its evolution. The Enterprise Architect will work in partnership with a project manager and executive sponsor.
REQUIRED & PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Minimum 10+ years of demonstrable experience building reliable, scalable solutions and software development architectures for the Finance industry that have scaled to a volume of 2 million users on a 24/7 basis.

• Demonstrable expertise in the practices, conventions and standards of the Finance industry with particular attention to the SEC, FTC, SOX, and PCI DSS security standards.

• Proven technical experience identifying, justifying and implementing cloud based technologies that are appropriate to the needs and constraints of the financial system under development.

• Demonstrated history of facilitating high performance teams under Agile and DevOps processes using industry standard collaboration tools and techniques.

• Comprehensive understanding of the principles of object oriented programming, function programming and distributed programming with expertise in at least 3 programming languages

• Expert in the principles and best practices of document centric and relational database design and implementation, with particular knowledge of Oracle, MongoDB and DB2.

• Working knowledge of AI and machine learning practices and technologies focused on predictive analysis of complex financial scenarios

• Excerpt in the principles and best practices of container and serverless orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes or the Serverless Application Model

• Architect level certification from a major cloud provider such as AWS, GKE or Azure, preferred but not required

• Solid, persuasive communication skills in both formal and informal settings.presentation skills

• Ability to collaborate with a wide variety of professional in a multinational setting

ABOUT OUR COMPANY: Our company's line of business is creating and providing predicative analysis services to meet the financial asset management needs of Fortune 500 companies. Our services operate 24/7 and exceed the security standards for the Finance industry. We presently employ 1500 people worldwide.

Listing 2: Creating a detailed job description for an Enterprise Architect forces the hiring company to give considerable thought to skills and expertise required for a prospective candidate.

Listing 2 provides a good degree of detail compared to Listing 1. The job description describes the hiring company's industry, and it lists the required business and technical expertise expected from an applicant. Also, it's worth mentioning that the keyword in the description is "demonstrable." Anyone applying for the job knows beforehand that they will need to be able to "walk the talk" and that proof of proficiency will be required.

There are two benefits to providing as much detail as possible in a job description for an Enterprise Architect. The first is that it advertises clear expectations as to what the job is about. Hopefully, only qualified people will apply, thus making the overall hiring process more efficient. The second benefit is that creating a detailed job description forces the hiring company to think long and hard about the project's objective, the scope of work, and the skill required to get the job done.

Knowing exactly what you are looking for is a tremendous benefit as you consider experience and certifications.

The value of experience and certification

At the end of the day, the bottom line question any hiring manager has to answer is this: Can the candidate sitting in front of me do the job I expect him or her to do? While there's no way of really knowing for sure, there are ways to figure out if the odds are favorable. One way is to look at the person's past experience. Another way is to look at the person's certifications.

Experience and certifications count. Analogically speaking, do I really want a brain surgeon with no prior experience cutting open my head? Do I really want to put myself in the hands of an anesthesiologist who is not board certified? The answer is no and no.

The analogy holds true for Enterprise Architects.

Enterprise development projects are notorious for being high risk. They typically come with development costs of $75K - $750K for a small company and $1 million to $10 million for a large company. That's a lot of money to put on the line. The easiest way to hedge your bet for success is to hire someone who has both the deep technical expertise required to understand the nuance of the project at hand and the breadth of professional experience to sense when things are going wrong.

It usually takes about ten years of hands-on experience to achieve the level of mastery required to be an Enterprise Architect at a medium to large size company. It's very similar to medicine. In order to be a certified physician, a person needs to attend four years of medical school and then do three to seven years of residency at a hospital or clinic to become a doctor. The same holds true for an Enterprise Architect. It takes about a decade of study and practice to become competent. There are some people out there who can do the work with less experience, but such people are rare. When it comes to hiring the right Enterprise Architect for your company, a minimum of ten years of demonstrable experience is a reasonable requirement to have.

With regard to certification, while the piece of paper does not guarantee professional excellence, at the least, it does show that the bearer has met the requirements of an independent certifying authority.

There is little downside to requiring that a prospective Enterprise Architect be certified according to his or her field of specialty. However, you need to beware. There are a lot of companies out there offering "certifications" that really don't mean much. These companies are more concerned with making money from an anxious workforce than providing credible documentation that reflects a certain degree of professional competence on the part of the bearer. In short, the certifying authority is just as important as the certification itself.

Note: To learn more about the different certifications for Enterprise Architects, read the article, What Type of Architect are You? on Red Hat's Enable Architects website.

For example, a Solutions Architect Certification issued by Amazon Web Services has a lot more credibility than an Enterprise Architect Certification issued by some company that requires nothing more than paying a $599 application fee and viewing a few online training videos.

The thing to remember is that you are the one doing the hiring, so when it comes to establishing the authenticity of a given certification, it's up to you to make sure that it's valid.

Putting it all together

Hiring the right Enterprise Architect for your company depends on a number of factors. No two companies are alike, no two software projects are alike, and there is no one size of Enterprise Architect that will fit all situations. Finding the right person is a challenge.

The trick is to know what you're looking for. This means publishing a detailed job description that provides a clear understanding of the skills and experience required for the position advertised. A clearly detailed job description will serve as a common point of reference for both the applicant and your company. The clearer the job description, the more likely you're going to find the Enterprise Architect that's right for your company.

The next thing is to decide if you're going to hire according to a specific project or take a more general approach and hire an Enterprise Architect who can work in a variety of areas.

Then there is the question of expertise and certification. The general rule of thumb is to hire someone with at least ten years of experience working on projects in medium to large size companies and at least one relevant certification that is respected by the profession.

Yet be advised, the "at least ten years" requirement is not written in stone. Many companies out there are willing to take the time to nurture a candidate who is a work-in-progress into an Enterprise Architect. This can be a good approach in times of labor shortages and budgetary constraints.

After all is said and done, the thing to remember is that nothing is guaranteed. You might very well hire a candidate who looked good on paper, did well throughout the interview process, and had sterling references, and then it turns out the person has evolved into someone impossible to work with. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. The best strategy to combat that experience is a crisp job description and a thorough set of questions related to the specifics.

As stated at the beginning of this piece, hiring an Enterprise Architect is hard, but it's not impossible as long as your company is very clear about what it's looking for in terms of experience and expertise.