Review: Elevating Enterprise Architecture

I had the pleasure over the holiday break to take the Elevating Enterprise Architecture course from Architecting the Enterprise. This was a truly refreshing course. I found many of the same themes I have talking about lately are reflected in this course. Namely, enterprise architecture soft skills.

When I ran across this course it really resonated with me. It is a rare breed of EA training. If you follow my blog you will quickly find out that I feel very strongly that the soft skills are the critical success factor to the effectiveness and ultimately success of enterprise architects. Below you will find more information from my blog where I talk about this more.

Often times when I present or conduct workshops and mention EA soft skills many folks are hungry to learn more about what I am referring to. I really like this course because to date I have been sending people to a set of books and independent courses that are both slightly out of context or unapplied to the unique challenges that EA’s face. This course acts as an accelerant and broad coverage of all those resources into a EA training course. A great example of this is the application of the Kotter’s 8 step framework to EA.

You can find this throughout the course materials. I have found that with some courses it is merely just an aggregation of materials into a training course. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was not the case. This was very much applied to the needs and concerns of EA’s while staying true to the proven methods in the leadership communities.

The course was well thought out and rolled up the essential core EA soft skills:

Emotional Intelligence
Change Management
Leadership
Communication
EA Empowerment

Below is a short video from AtE.

After sitting in on this course, I would most certainly recommend it to my fellow enterprise architects. The course provide the essential soft skills needed to be a highly successful enterprise architect. I would go so far as to say that it is a prerequisite for aspiring enterprise architects and taken as a refresher course for seasoned enterprise architects.

Comparing this course to other EA Courses I find that most pays soft skills lip service and when it does mention soft skills it is in a very technical manner such as PowerPoint presentation skills. I will iterate again that this is a unique course that provides thorough overview of proven methods in a manner consumable to practicing enterprise architects.

More Information from Architecting the Enterprise