New Enterprise Architecture Terms and Certificates Emerge
Today´s content forms the second of six parts of the series called “Who is still interested in Enterprise Architecture in 2021?”. In this series, I provide my view on the footprint of today´s Enterprise Architecture, the potential death of the role of an Enterprise Architect, the big players, such as TOGAF from The Open Group, AWS, or Azure, as well as the role of EA tool providers and other related certificates and developments on the market.
In today´s part two, I take a deeper look at the Google Trends analysis from part one and I also investigate a bit deeper on the certification landscape of The Open Group. Both confirms that, although many Enterprise Architecture terms become less important, the actual content stays up to date.
Regardless of whether you are reading this article or whether you are listening to the podcast version on my website, make sure to also check out the other parts of the series as soon as they are available!
Who is still interested in Enterprise Architecture in 2021?
– Part 2 of 6
Part one of this series ended with some questions of whether EA is dead — based on a couple of different findings. Part two is opposing this opinion.
One main argument came from the results from Google Trends, which show a clearly decreasing interest for some key EA search terms. To put this in context, it is vital to understand that there has been a shift of Google searches away from general terms. The general management of architecture layers are an example of such generic terms. Nowadays, more specific topics and concepts of Enterprise and IT Architecture are of interest.
High Demand for Particular Enterprise Architecture Terms
Figure 2 shows again the amount of search requests for the term “Enterprise Architecture” in blue. This time, it is compared to the terms “Master data”, “Scaled agile framework”, “Cloud Native Computing Foundation”, and “Microservices”. While those key words are clearly associated with the area of EA as well, they show strongly growing search volumes over the past years.
Interestingly, the more specific subtopics are, the more they outperform the more general terms. For instance, “Microservices”, which is a subset of the application landscape, has a higher search volume. Also, “Master data”, which is a subset of data management, outperforms the search volume of “Enterprise Architecture” in general.
Figure 2
In other words, the insights from Google Trends suggest the following: Generic EA terms decrease in interest, while more specific search terms — also at the heart of EA — increase in interest.
The New TOGAF Strategy
The second main argument from part one is that the TOGAF standard is not being renewed well enough to answer the questions that organizations in the digital era have.
Surprisingly, lowering the importance of TOGAF might even be part of The Open Group strategy. In doing so, they leave room to strengthen the market presence of newly developed products and guides. Examples are the Digital Practitioner Guide, the TOGAF Business Architecture guide, and the series guides.
In addition, The Open Group established several new certificates. Some of them cover new topics, but some of them also cover what one would expect to be part of the TOGAF standard. Taking such content out of the TOGAF standard suggests that The Open Group´s strategy is to achieve a certification diversification with less focus on TOGAF alone.
In the extreme case, it could also imply that the term “TOGAF” as a certification could slowly vanish. Meanwhile, the content would move towards more and new certifications that sound modern and more adequate nowadays. The TOGAF Standard, however, would not receive notable updates anymore.
If you want to learn more about that, make sure to check the links to my other articles provided below.
Also, thank you very much for your positive feedback and comments to the first part of this series. Do you agree or disagree with the main arguments in this second part? Happy to continue the discussion in the comments section below!
