Architect certification increasingly impacts professionalization of IT in the cloud era

We've assembled a panel in conjunction with the recent Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas, to explore the impact and role of certifications for IT professionals. Examine here how certification for enterprise architects, business architects, and such industry initiatives as ArchiMate are proving instrumental as IT organizations seek to reinvent themselves.

Looking at certification in general, you however have areas like Microsoft MCSE, Microsoft technical specialist, application development, and project management that are in demand, and things like CCNA from Cisco. However I've as well noticed a lot more in the security field. CISSP and CCSA seem to be the ones that are always getting a lot of attention. In terms of security, the trends in mobile computing, cloud computing, means that security certification is a big growth area.

de Raeve: There is a whole world out there of research and product-related certifications that are fulfilling a very important function in helping people establish and demonstrate their knowledge of those particular products and technologies.

However, what we’re intending to do is have some core requirements that architects need to meet, and at the time add some specific specializations for different types of architects. The one that we’ve been working on the most recently is the Business Architecture Certification. This came about from an initiative about 18 months ago.

We formed something called the Business Forum with a number of platinum members who got involved with it—companies like IBM, HP, SAP, Oracle and Capgemini. We’ve been defining the conformance requirements for the business architecture certification. It's going through the development process and hopefully will be launched sometime later this year or early at once year.

de Raeve: There's a very good example [of the importance of staffing issues in IT]…, and they’ve done a presentation about this in one of our conferences. It's Philips, and they used to have an IT workforce that was divided among the business units. The different businesses had their own IT function.

They changed that and went to a single IT function across the organization, providing services to the businesses. In this way, they needed to rationalize things like grades, titles, job descriptions, and they were looking around for a framework within which they could do this and they evaluated a number of them.