ITWire

Evans founded Enterprise Architects in 2002, and in a decade it’s grown to a $25 million a year business with 100 people working for or with it.

The range of projects which the firm has taken on across five continents is particularly diverse, but in many cases it works with organisations to execute a “change vision”. The company counts ACE Insurance in New York, Toronto’s TD Bank and Rio Tinto among its client base.

“Where you’re delivering ... transformation – for example a merger, the organisation needs to organise itself to affect that change. Enterprise architecture provides a blueprint and a roadmap for the organisation to see that execution through,” says Evans the founder and group CEO of Melbourne-based Enterprise Architects.

While Evan’s business has a strong IT focus it is not blinkered to the need for all the other disciplines needed to deliver significant transformation.

While his company offers consulting services it also provides training, staff through a specialised recruitment operation and the smarts to allow larger enterprises to establish their own internal enterprise architecture groups.

When it comes to defining exactly what an enterprise architect is or does there’s no single definition or skills set. According to Evans there is a spectrum of different enterprise architecture roles which each need different skills.

In general however he says enterprise architects need strong communication skills, emotional and analytical intelligence, well honed decision making capabilities and the ability to synthesise large volumes of information from disparate sources.