In the recent well know IT industry research firm’s study, analysts (the authors of the paper)  identified list of IT roles hard to fill even in this market. In the  paper, the top most of list is enterprise architect. EA role is  hard to find even in this poor job market. The report also stated that the demand of enterprise architect in 2008 grew and predicted that the demand of enterprise architect will continue to grow in 2009. The sample taken in the study is in the range of 250 companies.

Why companies hire enterprise architects even in this poor job market and here are my rationale.

1. Enterprise Architect is not like programming or administration skill. It can not be mastered by under going a certification process. It is a good balanced combination of  IT  and business knowledge to assist the senior executives to identify the discretionary and mandatory  spend of organization.
2. Cost optimization ideas are most needed and common in this economic climate and enterprise architect would play a significant role. Enterprise architects would be able to come with out of box ideas to sustain in the market condition. The specific ideas are based on the industry. Just to amplify the above point, let me take BFSI industry. A seasoned enterprise architect in BFSI industry will understand the major driver of the business and propose an investment strategy to the office of CIO.  Even to be more precise, in this credit market, consumer leading companies shall look for a refined credit score cards and EA would provide recommendation to executive management office that the systems in the IT landscape should be flexible to accommodate the changes to support the credit score card. Influence the executive steering committee of investment strategy team to assign more weights to credit scorecard project since it has direct impact to the bottom line of the lending business. Even in some cases, based on their business knowledge depth, EA are in good position to even recommend the credit risk management team in the lending company  various options available to non traditional credit score card fit the current economical situation. In stead of traditional logistic regression credit scoring model, they would be in better position to recommend how the joint time frequency analysis (like wavelet analysis, Gabor transformation, short time Fourier transform and etc)  can be applied particularly in this economy. There is no standard scoring model available which analyze the behavior of the credit market in the joint time and frequency domains and it is very appropriate in this economic situation.