SCEA Vs Togaf/Zachman

[Lave Kulshreshtha]

Experts,
I have around 9+ years of experiance. I have been involved in programing and design. I last 1.5 years, I have also closely seen the hetergenous applications working toghther.

Now I am trying to understand which shuld I go for SCEA or togaf/Zachman?

What is your view? I totally understand it depends on kind of work I have done but I want to understand what kind of experts chooses togaf/Zacman and when does people go for togaf?

Is it really exceptional to have both togaf and SCEA?

Thanks,
Lave

[Remko Strating]

Togaf has more to do with enterprise architecture so you need to address a lot of other things then only it-architecture.

I have read some things over Togaf but for me the framework is too complicated. I see a lot of companies with a design of the enterprise architecture, reality one and the way they really work, reality two. So you can write a nice architecture and everyone behaves has own way. Also it's my experience just write the way they work in the way they talk, see, feel and express themselves in their work this gives a better communication and a change to improve and learn. This is normally different from the way Togaf want you to describe the working of a company.


The nice thing with SCEA with is more to do with the it-architecture and more in common the J2EE-architecture, but if you have the abilities you can easily use them in an another context, is that you receive feedback over your architecture. If it's wrong it's working well, people are complaining, projects will last longer, you need to buy a lot of unnecessary hardware of getting the non-functional requirements, etc. Also you need to describe your architecture in a certain standard way so your technical peers will understand your architecture.

Off course you can do both. There is nothing wrong with that.

[Lave Kulshreshtha]

Thanks Ramko,
I will do bit reading before I take a decision.

Personally I am very much inclined towards enterpirse solutions, I am not an enterpirse architect right now but I think I would love to be.

What I am trying to understand is, does SCEA and togaf leads to different career path? If no how they are used together?

-Lave

[Remko Strating]

They could lead to a different career path, because mostly I believe SCEA-people are more technical oriented and Togaf-people more business like. Within most organisations there is a division between them.

For me I like sometimes programming, because I will get mad if I always have to talk, educate and convince people how to work better. On the other hand if I've programmed for a week I want to know how people use my program and how I have to improve it for making it better for them and I want to teach them my ideas and get new idea's and inspiration from them.

I have the luck that I mostly work for medium companies which are more practical so mostly I have both visions. Also they are mostly stuck with their own IT-department so I can easily introduce a different approach and believe me most IT-problems exists between the communication of the IT and the business.

If you are able to do both you're good. Because mostly technical people tend to go into the details and want everything certain and business people are more general and like it vague and are not interested in the technical details of an IT-solution, it just has to work.

My general advice is do the things you're love and don't do anything else because someone else advices you to do so. Following others advices has made a lot of people unhappy. So research for yourself if you love to do the enterprise architect role.

[Gaurav Tripathi]

Looking at your experience level, its good to take SCEA or IBM SOA like certifications. TOGAF certification is more to do with enterprise architecture like life cycle of enterprise arch., arch. repository, architecture governance, architecture change management etc. This would help you once you engaged in organization IT transformation, enterprise IT landscape etc.

- Gaurav
http://visitgaurav.blogspot.com/