I once heard an enterprise IT architect describe their job in a rather grim way. They said their job was to design beautiful systems architectures which everyone then completely ignored. Such is the life of an enterprise architect: all the experience and planning in the world can never fully survive first contact with the enemy, or in this case, the needs of the business.
It can be a thankless job, requiring practitioners to simultaneously assess the present, predict the future and assuage the pains of the past, all while building the social capital needed to enact enterprise-wide change.
But all is not lost for those out there who are tasked with making order out of the chaos of business systems. There are plenty of tools and best practices and open source projects and other stuff to help them do their jobs, every day. So much stuff, in fact, that we've whipped up a brand new blog specifically covering topics that enterprise architects would find appealing.
That's a wide swath of topics, covering everything from automating IT infrastructure to the meat-space skills associated with spreading the gospel of your prophetic systems diagrams. Stop by and take a gander at the great stuff they're writing about.
Heck, if all this sounds appealing to you as a next step in your career, there's even an article over there to help you do just that!
About the author
Red Hatter since 2018, technology historian and founder of The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. Two decades of journalism mixed with technology expertise, storytelling and oodles of computing experience from inception to ewaste recycling. I have taught or had my work used in classes at USF, SFSU, AAU, UC Law Hastings and Harvard Law.
I have worked with the EFF, Stanford, MIT, and Archive.org to brief the US Copyright Office and change US copyright law. We won multiple exemptions to the DMCA, accepted and implemented by the Librarian of Congress. My writings have appeared in Wired, Bloomberg, Make Magazine, SD Times, The Austin American Statesman, The Atlanta Journal Constitution and many other outlets.
I have been written about by the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Wired and The Atlantic. I have been called "The Gertrude Stein of Video Games," an honor I accept, as I live less than a mile from her childhood home in Oakland, CA. I was project lead on the first successful institutional preservation and rebooting of the first massively multiplayer game, Habitat, for the C64, from 1986: https://neohabitat.org . I've consulted and collaborated with the NY MOMA, the Oakland Museum of California, Cisco, Semtech, Twilio, Game Developers Conference, NGNX, the Anti-Defamation League, the Library of Congress and the Oakland Public Library System on projects, contracts, and exhibitions.
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