<<The goal of the new association is to raise the status of enterprise architects to a par with CPAs and lawyers' bar associations, according to the announcement made on the first day of the Open Group's Enterprise Architects Practitioners Conference in San Diego. The AOGEA already has 700 members and the Open Group, a vendor and technology neutral consortium, is also offering certification programs. More than 2,000 individuals have completed The Open Group Architecture Framework certification and approximately 1,700 practitioners have completed the organization's IT Architecture Certification since those programs began less than two years ago, according to today's announcement.
While applauding the Open Group program, Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, said more education is needed or SOA may be doomed by sheer lack of knowledge among the people trying to implement it. "The real thing that's holding SOA back is the lack of architectural experience," the analyst said. "Something has to be done. If this gap isn't filled I think the entire movement to service-oriented architecture could basically fail." Miko Matsumura, vice president of SOA marketing for webMethods Inc., echoed this concern in an interview last week with SearchWebServices where he said "the shortage of qualified visionary architects" would be one of the hot button issues facing the SOA world in 2007.>> You can read this in full at: <http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1241121,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=577580&asrc=EM_NLN_948609&uid=5532089> I don't know about you, but my attention was immediately grabbed by the statement that enterprise architects should aspire to be placed on the same level as CPAs and lawyers. Now I don't doubt that there exist EAs who are socially challenged/totally amoral, but I think such an aspiration of professional comparison should raise a just a few hackles among budding EAs.... Gervas
