The Accidental Enterprise Architect Is Disappearing, and That Might Be a Problem
Very few of today's senior enterprise architects set out to become one. They came up through programming, infrastructure, data, project delivery, or business systems, and they were pulled into enterprise-wide problems because something broke, something was being acquired, or somebody had to explain to executives why a major program went wrong. That unstructured path produced practitioners who understood the whole enterprise, not only its technology.
That path is disappearing. Enterprise architecture has become a structured career with structured credentials, and the best-known credentials measure whether a candidate can answer questions through a multiple-choice one-time exam, about a reference framework. Meanwhile, the role is expanding. Executives and boards now expect enterprise architects to connect strategic planning to information technology architecture, to govern AI, and to prove that architecture decisions produce outcomes.
We are certifying memorization at precisely the moment the job demands evidence of delivery. The answer is not to bring back the accidents. It is to deliberately manufacture the breadth those accidents used to provide.
