The increasingly complex systems nature of enterprise organizational and information technology design is creating an interesting disruption — and opportunity — for the role traditionally known as the “enterprise architect.” And it is a shift that, by its very nature, puts the very use of the term “architect” in question.
In the past, I’ve suggested the term “enterprise product manager” to describe what the enterprise architect is really being asked to do, but I now think there is a better term that explains this complex (and, quite honestly, complicated) role. This term is born from the observation that those responsible for the overall business systems now have to act more like scientists than like architects. There are certain “systems” sciences that their field now most resembles, and my personal favorite is ecology. Thus, I like the term “enterprise ecologist”.
Read more at GigaOM.
OpenStack has already earned support across the IT industry from users, developers, cloud providers, and vendors, but many deployments are still new, and we have yet to see how people will innovate around the platform. Everybody from AT&T to Rackspace and the Linux Foundation to IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, and Yahoo keeps touting innovation surrounding OpenStack, but where might there be surprises for the platform over the next several years.
If you’ve got some time to add another open source application to your arsenal, getting to know 