Enterprise architects join the team

IT organizations are starting to recognize that having some level of enterprise standards can remove needless complexity from application portfolios and help enable the responsiveness that businesses demand. Myriad organizational structures can implement such standards, but most result in some form of a centralized group of enterprise architects. The author have spent much of the last few years acting as the interface between such enterprise architects and large development teams working to deliver complex applications. Based on this experience, the author proposes a new form of interaction to improve team effectiveness: enterprise architects should join the development team.