The Extinction of Enterprise Architects, Fifty Secrets Managers, and Deodorant Before AI, with Rick Clark

Coté (0:00)

Now, Whitney, have you ever encountered an enterprise architect?

Whitney Lee (0:04)

Yes.

Coté (0:05)

And what's your impression of what an enterprise architect does? In, what is this, 2026?

Whitney Lee (0:13)

Well, first of all, I don't have 2026 experience with any enterprise architects. But in the past. It's slightly stale, but yeah.

My impression of the enterprise architects is that they seem overworked. They're too busy. They come in to a sales meeting. They listen to a short thing, and they say the minimum they need to to move the ball forward on that particular thing. And then they got to hop off to get to their next thing.

Coté (0:40)

I love that phrase. Is that like an American meeting phrase? I've got to hop to another call.

Whitney Lee (0:44)

Hop on. Yeah.

Coté (0:46)

Hop here, hop there, hopping everywhere. It seems like, you know, I remember I've encountered many enterprise architects in my career, especially back in the days of what they used to call Java Enterprise, which is all about enterprise architects, I think. Java 2E, I forget what it's called. But I think a little while ago, I even had a presentation about enterprise architects, and it was kind of hard to figure out how they fit into things or what their role was. I mean, your encounter with them sounds like they're busy doing something, but I'm not quite sure. I don't know how the role has changed from planning things out. One time I met an enterprise architect, and it was one of those, we all work at vendors. It was one of those meetings you have where the person really just wants to let you know, they are not interested in you, but they are also very smart.

They want you to just be there, and they want to talk with you and tell you things and go over stuff, but they have no reason to want anything that you might be representing for them. But they did have this great, almost wall-sized whiteboard that had their entire architecture for their company on it, with all the different boxes and systems. And that's kind of what I think of an enterprise architect is. It's like the person who draws that.

And, you know, that's like an artifact creation way of doing it. Like, what's another American businessism? The outputs, the outcomes? Deliverable.

Whitney Lee (2:32)

That's what they say.

Coté (2:34)

That's their deliverable. But it feels like probably there's something more.

Whitney Lee (2:39)

Or uniquely American.

Coté (2:40)

Deliverable? I don't know.

Whitney Lee (2:42)

Or popping in and out of a meeting.

Coté (2:46)

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, you know, Francis Bacon and Pascal didn't say deliverable. Like, it's probably got created over here.

I'm not sure. They probably didn't. And, you know, Luther probably wasn't like, Hey, Pope, here's my deliverable. And I've got to go pop off somewhere else and do something. Which I guess it's either, it's either 17th century philosophers and religious people or American. That's pretty much the divide there.

Whitney Lee (3:17)

We didn't ping you about this.

Coté (3:22)

We'll do a double click on it.

Whitney Lee (3:25)

Let's zoom in.

Coté (3:28)

Let me, speaking of zooming in, let me ask our guest, Rick Clark. We used to work together as we were just remembering, we used to enjoy the same fresh hummus and great coffee here in Amsterdam.

What is, it's 2026, September 1st as we record this. What is an enterprise architect now?

Rick Clark (3:50)

Well, it is an exceptionally rare thing that you don't see very often, that is nearly extinct. And the things that we call them now are not what they used to be or what they should be. So when Whitney was describing the enterprise architect, it sounded more like a solution architect, popping into a meeting, saying something, leaving.

And Coté, when you described the enterprise architect, you sounded like the old enterprise architect. Oh, right. Was like, there's a reason we don't have the enterprise architecture that we used to have. And that's the reason. They pop into a meeting to show they're superior to you, and then they leave.

And so we lost enterprise architecture as we shifted all the decisions left, right? Part of what's happened over the last 15 years is we shifted left, we shifted left, we shifted left. And we thought, we decided, ah, developer flexibility equals developer productivity equals value, right? And these architectural board review, this architecture, you have to do this, you have to do that, that slows down developers. They have to ask for approval for everything. So we carved out enterprise architecture. It slowly disappeared. It became first marketecture, and then it disappeared in a lot of places. It disappeared, and it left us with what I'm going to describe as chaos, no architectural coherence, right?