Dare Obasanjo, earlier this week:
The funny thing about a lot of the people who claim to be 'Enterprise Architects' is that I've come to realize that they tend to seek complex solutions to relatively simple problems. How else do you explain the fact that web sites that serve millions of people a day and do billions of dollars in business a year like Amazon and Yahoo are using scripting languages like PHP and approaches based on REST to solve the problem of building distributed applications while you see these 'enterprise architect' telling us that you need complex WS-* technologies and expensive toolkits to build distributed applications for your business which has less issues to deal with than the Amazons and Yahoos of this world?
Gbooyakasha! I've recently had occasion to discuss my "enterprise" credentials with some mainstream-y CIO/CTO types. It always amazes me how many of that number gaze vacantly at simple architectural ideas, and find true comfort in endless, overlapping boxes with data arrows flying in all dizzying directions, so long as those boxes are labeled "Oracle", "SAP" and such. I certainly understand it's easy to confuse simple with simplistic, but unnecessarily complicated should not be so hard to spot, and it's all over the place in your friendly neighborhood enterprise.
I've considered myself an enterprise architect because I've worked in the architecture of solutions that require workflow across departments within medium-sized organizations. Lately, however, I've come to wonder whether unfortunate practice has tainted the title.