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mercredi 3 novembre 2010

Engineer vs.Architect

"Engineer vs. Architect"
"What is the difference between an IT Engineer (Network, Software) vs. IT Architect (Infrastructure, Application)? Are these synonymous?"
Discussion started by Majedah Taliep in March 2010

The IT Architect Network Group

As of November 3rd 2010 :  282 comments.

My comments posted in October 2010.
"How about addressing this question from an academical perspective ?

In France, IT architecture courses are included within the cursus to get an (IT) engineer diploma ("Diplôme d'Ingénieur"). It is a five years curriculum. Other courses include maths, statistics, physics etc.

How is it in US university ?"

from a professional perspective, you are right. At the end of day, what matters is what you have delivered (for your company, clients, ...)

However, a little bit later, at home, at supper time, with your family or relatives, what matters is how much you bring back from your working day and "labels" sometimes might be determining" 

"That the role of an architect would be limited to a design role as it might be the case in building might be questionned in information systems.

Under this viewpoint, most EA frameworks material to design an enterprise would seem rather incomplete : do these EA framework represent any enterprise human architecture guidelines ? or enterprise process architecture guidelines ?"

""Engineer vs Architect" is a real teasing formulation. Thank you again Majedah to have initiated it.

In France, when a student gets a "Diplôme d'Ingénieur " in IT from a Grande Ecole d'Ingénieur, which is between 4 and 5 years studying after college, he should have embarked with him some knowledge in hardware, software, process, organization, finance, HR, etc but also in maths, statistics, physics, a foreign language (English of course but probably Chinese in the coming years) and most of the case some field experience abroad where you can experience what culture is about.

Finally, the graduated student can apply either for an "architect" position or an "engineer" position..

Maybe "Architect vs Engineer" is a payroll discussion ?"

well,.. Larry Page, Serge Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and others have invented their own EA for their companies, haven't they ?"
indeed there is a difference between designing a business system and a business capability.

But maybe Larry Page, Serge Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and others are also great Enterprise Architects...who knows... 

Or someone who has neither these two capabilities but the leadership to manage those who have ? 
Maybe that's why some enterprise architectures fail to deliver their promises...which have been oversold. 
please note that CIGREF, an association of the leading French companies from the client side has just released a study on IT competences titled "2010 - Nomenclature 2010 : premier pas vers l'Europe des compétences IT" (200 pages+).

The purpose of this impressive work is to converge to a "European e-competence framework - e-CF"