When he/she is not certified!

Ok - so this isn’t the case today. But it won’t be long before it’s the case so mark my words!

I’ve spent quite a lot of time working with the IASA and on our own Microsoft Certified Architect program over the past year or so discussing the question of how do you recognise an architect! I wrote an article for International Developer and someone mentioned that this had been referred to by Adrian Bridgewater in his ‘Architectural Angst’ ZDNet blog entry last month too.

I got a bit of a bidirectional kicking when I was quoted (not quite correctlyJ) by Jason Stamper when he suggested that Microsoft was calling for a consensus on architecture certification. Not totally true – but not a bad idea IMO hey? A single way to recognise an architect – got to be worth thinking about.

So there are the stirrings of a debate... or it may be just down to me and my mild paranoia – or perhaps not!

What really got me thinking was a comment from Andy Hopkirk at the NCC who explained how the government ‘is getting enterprise architecture!’ through a talk on e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF ) and Cross-Governmental Enterprise Architecture (xGEA). Now this stuff is fascinating and I thoroughly recommend you look at it:)!

And then the jigsaw puzzle started to fall in place – why are the NCC looking into architectural professionalism? It’s because if you want to do business with the government then the government wants to ensure you know how they work.

Ok, not a problem if you don’t work in the government space, but it’s not long before one can imagine this pervading to all corners of the IT landscape. After all if this is how government IT works then it makes sense that's how we all should work - no?

So watch this space – coz if guy’s like these don’t get it right we could find we’re stuck with a professional definition that doesn’t reflect what we actually all do!